My City My Responsibility - Water Footprint of Pune

Dear All, 

Last time we saw how water is required in everything that we use and is present in everything that we consume. So today lets see what is water footprint and why it is so important??? 

Water footprint is the amount of freshwater that is either consumed or polluted or wasted in the production of goods or services. Thus water footprint is the combined measure of direct and indirect usage of water. Its important to know your water footprint simply because the source from where the water is acquired is very crucial. There are three different components of water footprint based on their source and are termed as green water footprint, blue water footprint and grey water footprint. 

Green water footprint is the water that is sourced through precipitation and is captured in the root zone of the soil, thus used by plants or the food that we consume. Blue water footprint is the water that is sourced from the surface or groundwater reserves in order to consume or produce any goods. While grey water footprint refers to the freshwater that is used to dilute the polluted water. This freshwater is the one that comes from our rivers or our groundwater sources. 

In Pune our polluted water is directly let into our rivers with or without treatment making our freshwater sources completely polluted. It also pollutes our groundwater sources like our wells and streams through percolation. Hence in Pune out of the three water footprint components the grey water footprint is alarmingly high thus turning our rivers into wastewater streams.

Mutha river Pune

Water is essential for life. Access to safe and clean water is therefore a necessary condition to the Right to Life that our constitution gives us. We must therfore advocate for keeping our rivers ecologically and sustainably clean and flowing. From this perspective, we also need to critically examine the riverfront development in Pune which fails to consider the riverine ecosystem against short term commercial interests.

We shall see what is a riverine ecosystem in the next blog. 

Pournima Agarkar.