Corporate lessons in saving water

In an attempt to set right the enormous environmental destruction due to urbanisation, several corporate houses and other organisations are pitching in,  in the form of CSR to conserve water.

Corporate houses such as the Tatas, HCC, Reliance, Pepsico India, Ambuja Cements and Hindalco are setting up projects all over the country.

Corporates are focusing on regions where water availability is already acute and where those living below the poverty line are hit the hardest. Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), which recently bagged the award for best Social Investment Strategy at the World CSR Congress, began to focus on water conservation as a consequence of its concerns about the business risks posed by physical scarcity, where there is no sufficient water to meet demand and economic scarcity, where communities lack the infrastructure and/or financial capacity to access the water they require.

HCC, the only Indian company to be featured in a climate report issued by the UNGC and United Nations’ Environment Programme, has not only installed rainwater harvesting projects and artificial ponds for water management and augmentation in Faridabad and Delhi but has also constructed desalination plants in Mumbai as a part of CSR.

Lawyer and environmentalist Girish Raut feels that industrialisation has done irreparable damage to our natural resources, leading to calamities and man-made droughts.

“What are being offered as solutions to circumvent these problems are the problem themselves,” Raut laughs. Global warming and water scarcity is a by-product of urbanisation at the cost of the environment. We are suffering the consequences of having a growing GDP and exploiting energy resources for market gain, he explained.

Highlighting the dire need of the hour, ‘Charting our water future: Economic frameworks to inform decision-making’, a report by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm states: “If these “business-as-usual” trends are insufficient to close the water gap, the result in many cases could be that fossil reserves are depleted, water reserved for environmental needs is drained, or—more simply—some of the demand will go unmet, so that the associated economic or social benefits will simply not occur.”

The report further explained: “By 2030, demand in India will grow to almost 1.5 trillion m3, driven by domestic demand for rice, wheat, and sugar for a growing population, a large proportion of which is moving toward a middle-class diet. Against this demand, India’s current water supply is approximately 740 billion m3. As a result, most of India’s river basins could face severe deficit by 2030 unless concerted action is taken.”

Even non-government organisations like Rotary Club of Bombay have involved themselves in water conservation projects taking into account the dearth of water in Maharashtra and its neighbouring states.

President Padmakar Nandeka informs about the 50 water check dams that the organisation has built in places like Rajasthan. “We also have a conservation project in Thana. Every Holi, we use two tankers of water but this time we have decided not to go for it considering the issues of our time,” he elaborated.