While filling water in the morning, I started thinking about what I was doing and how it is impacting my life and that of others like me.
On average, I spend at least one and a half hour each day, filling water for our daily needs. That is 1.875 days a month, 22.81 days a year and 1.24 years, if I continue doing this for the next 20 years i.e. for approximately 0.62% of my life, I would just be filling water!
Time which can be better spent in other productive activities for the betterment of my and my family’s life, yet I am caught up in a never ending cycle of arranging for just the basic needs! Add to this, in order to get water in our ground floor flat, we use a 0.4HP pump, which I guess consumes 1KV electricity for every two hours of operations i.e. 0.273MW of electricity every year and 5.46MW in the next 20 years!
To top it all, we are not really poor and I live in the Capital of India, in a government built colony, which was established some 35 years ago! Yet I will be wasting a few lakh rupees (keeping only current prices and earning in mind) over the next couple of decades, trying to arrange for water, the most basic necessity of life!
I shudder to think of the plight of poor people in India and those living in unauthorized colonies, which do not even have access to a tap and have to walk quite a bit of distance to arrange for even drinking water and in many cases, have to shell out large sums of money on a regular basis to the water mafia, just to ensure that they can carry on living in the current dilapidated state they are in!
No wonder, poor in India only get poorer over time and are easily exploited by businessmen and politicians, who stick to them like a leech and have no intention of even attempting to ensure that at least people are free from the fear of dying of thirst, in the country of Ganges.
6 Comments
I think you should stick to writing technical articles 😀
I thought that sort of writing was the domain of Phunsukh Wangdu :D, a simpleton like me can only hope to write what ever touches his heart.
One and a half hours, that’s serious! And imagine if you also spent one-two hours commuting each day.
We know that govt is failing in basic duties. After the most basic responsibility of govt, that is to maintain law and order so that ordinary people’s activities of maintaining themselves can go on, the most basic duty is to provide water. In this time it is no more a situation where people live in villages and get water from rivers and wells. Some do, of course, and there is the matter of pollution of rivers.
Rural people always tell that the time and energy spent in fetching water is an issue for them.
Something about power:
750 watt: 1 hp
1000 watt: 1kW
1000 kW : 1MW
1 V is 1 Volt, 1A is Ampere, so 1 V * 1A = 1 KV or 1 watt
So you waterpump uses 0.4 * 0.750 = 0.3 kw/hour
Thats 0.6 kW a day or
219 kW a year or 0.219 MW …..
cheers fritz
btw sweating in the heatwave.
1 week not with 32 degrees plus….
that hot in scandinavia
YS, your line of thinking and the conclusion you have drawn are right, I think! In the same line, probably we can say,’distance’ is one factor, rather crucial factor which affects the ‘cost of living’. In most of the cities, where the cost of living is high, the distance from one point to other is also very large. I have very little experiences, but what seems to me is that, I need to travel 25 kms daily for my job which also adds to my cost of living, since for the same reason I need domestic help! Now, if it would have been few kms, I would not have, probably, depend on the help! Again, I would probably have been able to spend some time doing something more creative!
On a slightly different line of argument, I would rather differ from you in saying that, poor remains poor for, perhaps, they donot have the urge to hone the skills they have and earn more! Correct me if I am wrong, most of the beggars you encounter at city traffic signals, are physically fit! But, given a chance they would simply deny to do any physical labour! In my native city, I remember, when my parents used to offer some good amount of money in exchange of some house maintenance work, they simply denied it! But they were happy to receive 50 paise as alms! Now 30 minutes of their begging could not fetch them, I am sure Rs. 50-60!
To cut the long story short, I am not anti-poor, neither I deny the fact that they are exploited by all, but then also, I would say, problem lies somewhere else!
–Warm Regards,
Fritz, you forgot to take usual bad quality and old parts in to account :D. On a serious note, only got relief from humidity today, as it rained somewhat decently.
Travelaholic, beggars are entirely different breed, in fact I would only count maybe 10% of them as actual poor and downtrodden, who can not do anything but to look for a handout. Rest are just lazy or drug addicts, who are looking for enough money to pay for their next “trip”.