The Tap Taught me

In the city of Mumbai, there lived a scientist named Doctor Ajay Kumar. One day he went to meet his best friend, Vinod. Vinod was a wealthy businessman and lived in a beautiful large house with his family. When Dr Ajay reached there, he saw Vinod’s two sons playing with the water pipe in the garden instead of watering the flowers as they were supposed to. It was not something new for him. Ajay very well knew that Vinod’s family had a habit of wasting a lot of water. They always took long showers, their car washer would use a water pipe to wash the car instead of just using a wet cloth to clean it, and their kids frequently forgot to close the taps after use, even though they went to excellent schools. Ajay often told Vinod to be a little more careful while using such a precious resource as water, but he just did not care. He said to Ajay that a person needs at least this much water to live his life. Ajay knew that Vinod would not listen to him, so he had to think of another way to teach him a lesson.

Meanwhile, the newspapers were flooding with reports and case studies about a small village, Tarangpur, near the city facing an extreme water shortage. The village had nearly two hundred small families, and there was just one tap from which water came only once or twice a day. The time for which the water was available was also reducing day by day due to the depletion of the water table. Ajay was reading these reports every day. He thought it was not very pleasant that the villagers in Tarangpur need to suffer due to the unavailability of water while people in the city like Vinod’s family were taking it for granted. The next day he went to the government office and talked with the officials there. He suggested that they get the water tap in the village of Tarangpur connected to the large dam located near the city. The ministry was not very convinced by this idea. Many villages in the state were at some level or the other facing problems of water shortage and unavailability of clean water. They cannot just keep connecting the water lines of these villages to the dam built, keeping in mind some other important and financial activities like generating hydroelectricity and production purposes. Dr Ajay assured them that he wants this to be done only for a few weeks. After that, he will change it as it originally was. He also said that he intends to conduct this job. Being a very well-known and trusted scientist, Ajay got permission from the government ministries to go ahead with the plan.

For the next few weeks, Dr Ajay and his team worked on the project. Within a month, they were successfully able to connect the village tap to the dam. However, it was not the only change he made in the tap. On the day when he had to tell the villagers and the rest of the public about his idea, he said to the village people that now as this tap is connected to the dam where plenty of water is stored, the water will not go off at any time of the day. Still, they cannot open the tap th

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emselves. The tap will automatically open, and after some time, it will again close on its own. It will not follow any schedule; it can start and stop at any time. This left the village people with a little bit of doubt that the water may only be available for a short duration of time in a day, but soon this thought proved to be wrong. The water tap would open many times in the day and often for long durations. As soon as the tap started, all the villagers would gather there within just a few seconds. To ensure that even those precious drops that came in these few seconds are not wasted, they kept a small bucket under the tap to store it. In just three days, the entire village was able to quench their thirst, which had been there for such a long time before the tap was changed. All the two hundred families were so grateful and happy that finally, they had sufficient clean water. Every news channel was showing the same thing how in just three days, with this automatic water tap, the entire village was able to fulfil its thirst.

Dr Ajay Kumar was at Vinod’s place. Both were watching the news about Tarangpur. Vinod praised Ajay a lot for this great work but had confusion. He asked Ajay what was the purpose of making the tap automatic. He could have just connected it to the dam, and the villagers could open it themselves according to their convenience. To this, Ajay smiled and told him what settings he did to make the tap function like this. He said, “I had two things to look into; one that the villagers in Tarangpur get some clean water to drink and secondly, make the people in the city realise that if they save water, they are saving many lives. When I was connecting that tap to the dam, I fixed a sensor in it. I made it in such a way that the tap would open as soon as it detected any tap being turned on in your house, may it be in the garden, washroom, or kitchen. The tap in the village would automatically start at the same time. It means that the water required to save these villagers is as much as your family alone consumed in the past three days. If you all had used this resource judiciously, the problem of water shortage in the village would not have come.”

Vinod felt ashamed of himself. He understood that Ajay was right. The water that his family used was enough to quench the thirst of so many people. He wrote a letter to another friend who was a newspaper editor about how embarrassed he felt. His friend was very impressed by his letter and published it in the newspaper. Soon all the people in the city got to know about it and understood that it is not just Vinod’s fault; it was their fault too. All of them tried their best to save water. After a few more weeks, the tap in Tarangpur was turned back to its original form, but one thing was different. Now the water would not go off frequently. In the last few weeks, the water table got some time to renew as the people in the city were now hardly wasting any. They now know that every drop counts.