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Sight of people fighting over water sends plumbers on to India’s streets

With the country’s major cities set to run out of groundwater in 2020, volunteers are helping to conserve precious supplies.

Indian plumber Dibakar Das, who works with water conservationist Aabid Surti, during his rounds in Mumbai. The initiative aims to repair plumbing problems for free. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty

Drenched in perspiration on a muggy Sunday afternoon in New Delhi, Ashia Saifi climbs up and down the stairs of apartment buildings, ringing on doorbells and asking if residents have any leaking taps they want fixed.

Sometimes, the door is slammed shut in her face. People are scared of intruders and strangers, even though Saifi sports a little white cap that’s the emblem of the Aam Aadmi party (Common Man), or AAP, which rules the Indian capital.

But other times, she, and the plumber accompanying her, are invited in, and they check for leaks in bathrooms and kitchens.

Saifi and the plumber, Mohammed Nazim, are part of a water saving campaign launched by AAP leader Somnath Bharti in his constituency of Malviya Nagar. Bharti was inspired by Aabid Surti, a former cartoonist and writer, who offers the same service to homes in Mumbai.

Bharti says it was the sight of “people fighting over water, people crying over water” in slum areas of New Delhi, where residents rely on tankers to deliver water, that galvanised him into action.

“We use WhatsApp to organise our volunteers who go whenever they have time – during weekdays or weekends. It’s serving a dual purpose. The team of volunteers and a plumber fix the leaks but also make people aware of the need to save water if the city is to be spared the dire predictions of experts,” says Bharti.

A report last year by the government-run thinktank NITI Aayog predicted that 21 major cities in India are poised to run out of groundwater in 2020. Anxious to do his bit – and perhaps with an eye on elections to the New Delhi assembly in February 2020 – Bharti launched his campaign last month. New Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, has said that if the pilot project produces results, it will be replicated across the capital.

Knocking on doors is slow work, and not just because of the brutal humidity. The rules of Indian hospitality dictate that visitors take off their shoes, sit down, partake of refreshments and snacks, and indulge in pleasantries before the job of checking taps can begin.

At a third floor flat, the owner, Neelam Malik, welcomes the group and, after serving Pepsi and crisps, shows Nazim around. It takes him just a few minutes to fix a tap in the bathroom and a washer in the kitchen.

But Malik points through the window to a block of flats where two water tanks on the roof are overflowing. “That is the real problem. You need to go there to tell them to make sure those overhead tanks don’t leak because that is a huge waste,” she says.

In New Delhi, even in the richest homes, piped water from the municipal authorities flows into homes for only a couple of hours a day. Home owners store the water in huge tanks placed on the roof.

Sitting inside their homes, residents have no way of knowing when the rooftop tanks are full. There are devices that will sound an alarm when water starts to overflow, but most residents don’t have one.

Bharti is aware of the problem. “We are talking to the alarm manufacturers to see if they can provide them to us in bulk at subsidised prices so that we can give them to all residents at a low price,” he says.

In a few months’ time, Bharti will check the total amount of water supplied to Malviya Nagar to see if it has reduced as a result of the campaign.

But for Vikrant Tongad, a water conservationist and activist in the city, the AAP has got its priorities wrong. He welcomes Bharti’s campaign but says plugging leaking taps is minor compared with the need to repair and modernise the underground water supply lines, which leak 40% of the city’s total water supply before it gets anywhere near homes.

“The pipes are so old and badly maintained that we [are losing] vast amounts of water,” says Tongad. “I appreciate Bharti’s efforts but the party should focus on fixing the lines.”

Bharti says the AAP government has plans in place. “We are replacing the old supply lines and using new technology that gauges the water pressure in the lines to alert engineers of any leaks,” he says.

In Mumbai, Surti is pleased with the initiative’s progress. “It’s not just Delhi. I am getting groups of concerned citizens all over India telling me that they are following my example in their neighbourhood. Saving water is a global project which all Indians should join.”

Thanks a ton Aalif for designing such a fantastic poster specially for DDF. Friends, share it, if you like it… or not. The message is loud & clear even for baboons

Aabid Surti is an odd character. A few years ago, the angular, bearded author was invited to meet the President of India to receive a national award for literature at a ceremony in the capital, New Delhi. He politely declined. Absorbed in writing the first draft of his new novel, he cited the reason that he did not have time. But what he has made time for every Sunday for seven years now, is going door-to-door in Mira Road, a non-descript suburb of Mumbai, with a plumber in tow, asking residents if they need their tap fixed for free!

As a distinguished Indian painter and author, Aabid has written around 80 books but no story so moved him as the truth about water scarcity on the planet. “I read an interview of the former UN chief Boutros Boutros Ghali,” he recalls, “who said that by 2025 more than 40 countries are expected to experience water crisis. I remembered my childhood in a ghetto fighting for each bucket of water. I knew that shortage of water is the end of civilized life.”

Around the same time, in 2007, he was sitting in a friend’s house and noticed a leaky tap. It bothered him. When he pointed it out, his friend, like others, dismissed it casually: it was too expensive and inconvenient to call a plumber for such a minor job – even plumbers resisted coming to only replace old gaskets.

A few days later, he came across a statistic in the newspaper: a tap that drips once every second wastes a thousand litres of water in a month. That triggered an idea. He would take a plumber from door to door and fix taps for free – one apartment complex every weekend.

As a creative artist, he had earned more goodwill than money and the first challenge was funding. “But,” he says, “if you have a noble thought, nature takes care of it.” Within a few days, he got a message that he was unexpectedly being awarded Rs.1,00,000 ($2,000) by the Hindi Sahitya Sansthan (UP) for his contribution to Hindi literature. And one Sunday morning in 2007, the International Year of Water, he set out with a plumber to fix the problem for his neighbors.

He began by simply replacing old O-ring rubber gaskets with new ones, buying new fixtures from the wholesale market. He named his one-man NGO ‘Drop Dead’ and created a tagline: save every drop… or drop dead.

Every Sunday, the Drop Dead team – which consisted of Aabid himself, Riyaaz the plumber and a female volunteer Tejal – picked the apartment blocks, got permission from the housing societies, and got to work. A day before, Tejal would hand out pamphlets explaining their mission and paste posters in elevators and apartment lobbies spreading awareness on the looming water crisis. And by Sunday afternoon, they would ensure the buildings were drip-dry.

By the end of the first year, they had visited 1533 homes and fixed around 400 taps. Slowly, the news began to spread.

In March 2008, director Shekhar Kapur, who was working on his own water conservation film, heard about Aabid’s efforts and wrote on his website: ‘Aabid Surti, thank you so much for who you are. I wish there were more people like you in this world. Keep in touch with us and keep inspiring us. Shekhar.’

Local newspapers began to write about Drop Dead, which prompted a further flood of grateful emails and spontaneous messages. One of the most heartfelt messages was from superstar actor-producer Shah Rukh Khan, a longtime fan of Aabid’s work as a comic book creator. After reading the newspaper report titled ‘City of Angels’, he wrote to Aabid: “…It sounds like one of the little big things my dad would have done. Strange that I have enjoyed [your comic] Bahadur in my childhood and enjoyed reading your tap story so many years down the line… when I am father myself. God bless you and yes, I believe in angels after reading the newspaper.”

In 2010, Aabid Surti was nominated for the CNN-IBN CJ ‘Be The Change’ Award. In the same year, a television crew from Berlin flew down to follow him on his Sunday rounds which continued come monsoon or shine.

It’s hard to say how much water he has saved with his mission, given that the faucets he fixed could have continued leaking for months, and maybe years, had he not rung the doorbell one Sunday morning. But conservatively, it could be estimated that he has single-handedly saved at least 5.5m litres of water till date.

In the summer of 2013, the state where Aabid lives is expecting its worst drought in 40 years. Months in advance, the Chief Minister Prithviraj Chauhan has warned citizens to begin conserving water. While ministers lobby for drought-relief packages worth millions of dollars, Aabid sees his own approach as simple and inexpensive.

As he rings another door-bell on yet another Sunday in Mira Road, seven years into his one-man mission, he says: “Anyone can launch a water conservation project in his or her area. That’s the beauty of this concept. It doesn’t require much funding or even an office. And most importantly, it puts the power back in our own hands.”

I would call him a modern-day angel; I am lucky I get to call him dad.

Author: Aalif Surti

January 26, 2013