Most of the water the urban world uses simply goes down the drain. The daily bath you and your family take accounts for the maximum water consumption in the house.
According to the National Building Code, the water supply for a residential apartment in a Class A city (population more than 1 lakh) is designed on the basis of 135 litres

per capita per day (lpcd). In reality, this sometimes extends to about 200 lpcd. Bathing drains away 55 litres, followed by toilets flushing out 30 litres, and much later comes cooking (5 litres) and drinking (5 litres).
While there are innumerable statistics to prove that we as a society waste millions of gallons of water, there have been few attempts to counter the building pressure.
The approaches have been broadly of two kinds: supply side solutions (like rainwater harvesting, seawater desalination and transporting water from rivers) and demand side solutions (like leakage control, water conservation and wastewater reuse).
Talking of bathrooms and toilets alone, there are a few solutions such as rainwater harvesting, water storage and recycling where we could get aggressive. “Wastewater recycling alone is a growing segment across the world. Israel can lay claim to be the clear world leader here. Nearly 90 per cent of the total wastewater in Israel is treated and over 70 per cent is reused,” says H. Subramaniam, COO, Earth Water Group.
Those who want to make a start may opt for a Water-
pebble in the bathroom and a waterless urinal in the toilet. UK design firm Priestmangoode has created the Waterpebble, an innovation that tracks water use in the shower. A small disc is placed near the shower drain; when it is first used, it learns how long the user’s showers typically are. Then, during subsequent showers, it uses a series of “traffic light” signals ranging from green to red to tell consumers when to finish. “Each time it’s used, the product fractionally reduces the length of the user’s shower, resulting in water savings without the need for any conscious effort,” says Paul Priestman, designer of the concept.
Better still, start having bucket baths. This will cut down on your bath water use by half. While the Waterpebble can be ordered online from www.firebox.com for £7.99, you could easily get a waterless urinal in India. One such urinal, the Kupple Waterless, has been developed indigenously by AG Aqua Solutions.
“Considering each flush drains almost 2.5 litres of water, water-saving products such as these help us save almost 1000 litres of water per day (if we take an average for 100 people who use the flush at least four times a day),” says Siddharth Agarwal, MD, AG Aqua Solutions.
Other lifestyle changes include finding out how much water you use. Use a water calculator (at www.h2oconserve.org) to see what you can do to cut back. Take shorter showers; and check faucets for leaks and drips. Conserve water outside your home by reducing your lawn size and choosing drought-tolerant xeriscapes (landscapes that reduce or eliminate the need for supplemental water from irrigation).
You could also recycle municipal water and on-site gray water, or harvest rainwater to use in the garden. Form a watershed group and support or start water-quality monitoring programmes. Once you join these, you will realise that citizen-based water-quality monitoring is a meaningful way to understand the health of our waterways.