Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink as taps run dry

Walking through the office corridors the other day, I spotted a series of posters extolling the need for energy conservation, waste prevention and water conservation. Those posters also took me back to my school days when we had to memorize English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. "Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink," so went the poem. Though Coleridge and his poem are history, water is still a bone of contention in the 21st century and looks to be so in the future also. And not just that, it is also a ticking time bomb that could trigger major wars between nations in the future, say experts.

So why do we need to conserve water, my daughter asked me the other day. I did not have any other answer other than that the once-abundant resource is now disappearing at an alarming rate.

But what raised my ante recently was when my friend K.V. Ashok, who owns a small public relations company in the southern Indian city of Chennai shared with me his problems in sourcing drinking water. Chennai, and for that matter the rest of India, is facing an acute water shortage.