Water is the material substance that created life, says Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC), the earliest Ionian philosopher and one of the Seven Sages of Greece who lived in Ionia, the ancient region of coastal Anatolia (present day Turkey). We in Lahore in the year 2016 on the banks of the river Ravi aver that water destroys life. The effect, however, manipulated it may be, matters much more than the cause. Whenever an ordinary mortal slakes his thirst with a glass of water, “his heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains his sense as though of hemlock I had drunk”. All this happens in a city which is heart of what is, these days, called the Land of Five Waters (Rivers) but had been described by Mahabharata as the land of six rivers and by Rig-Veda the land of seven rivers. The liquid poison that we seem destined to taste is not what larger-than-life Amrita Pritam says the Five Rivers were full of at the time of the bloody Partition of India in 1947 which entailed division of Punjab.

The river Ravi, an inexhaustible life line of Lahore (also of Multan and ancient Harappa) has gone dry as under the Indus Waters Treaty it was awarded to India which diverted its flow to its arid lands such as Rajasthan. This fast-flowing meandering river on whose banks the sacred Mantras (Hymns) of Rig-Veda were revealed to the meditating ‘Rishis’ is not even a trickle. It’s now an icicle petrified on the visage of a lost age. If we decide to enact the famous the Battle of the Ten Kings (Dasarajna) fought (between different Bharata kingdoms) on the Ravi as described in the Rig-Veda, the river’s dry bed would be a much better stage than its banks.

The river, after having gone dry, imperceptibly turned into a big open sewer. Factories on both sides of the river without fear or reluctance dump their solid chemical waste in the river bed. Toxic effluents and dangerous fluids emitted by industrial plants incessantly inject the watery poison into the subsoil. It was the seepage from the Ravi’s flow that made Lahore famous for its sweet and clean water. Lahore has been a city half-surrounded by the river; its waves splashed against the formidable walls of the Royal Fort till the middle of Mughal era. Fresh glacial waters full of natural minerals seeping into the soil created currents of sweet water. Now the city is affected by reverse process; waste, refuse, garbage and fluids of unregulated industrial production constantly add to underground deposits contaminating the water table. Hence water is not only unsuitable for human consumption but also dangerous for bird, animals, plants and crops. The phenomenon is not confined to the banks of the Ravi. Badly designed and poorly managed industrial units all around Lahore are fast turning it into a deadly cesspool. “All the corners of my robe are soiled/which one should I clean first,” they say in Punjabi.

The city with population of over 11 million has no treatment plant for chemical waste and fluids. Nor has it a solid waste treatment plant. Industrial plants when pressured by corrupt government officials, which happens very rarely, in response to public protests, make use of pits. That means contaminated fluids are first stored in pits and then are mechanically pumped into the soil without being treated.

Advertisement

Lahoris in their sixties and seventies say ruefully that in their youth one bored 30 feet into the underground aquifer and got clean and drinkable water. The water was considered “halka te mitha” (light and sweet) which implied that it was good for stomach and digestive system. If you use water pumped out from such a depth now, you are likely to die of diarrhoea or gradual liver failure. No wonder we have here high incidence of hepatitis. Now tube wells, managed and run by the local government, are more than 600 feet deep. The water found 500 feet below the ground has been thoroughly contaminated due to what the unrestrained dumping of industrial waste has done to the innards of the earth.

Increasing needs of increasing population and capitalist growth demand pumping of an unimaginably vast amount of water that inevitably forces water table to go down. Nobody is prepared to realize that supply of natural water is not limitless. Water’s unchecked wastage will make it scarce not in too distant a future. In Lahore, as elsewhere in the Punjab, a man from middle or upper class uses some gallons of clean water while shaving. He turns a faucet on and lets it run for at least six minutes as he feels very groggy in the morning. Women are indifferent to the huge amount of water they waste while laundering clothes. Almost every car, especially at car showrooms, is washed daily with clean water, not realizing the excessive use of it will make the vehicle rusty. Tonnes of clean water keep the big grassy lawns of sprawling houses and palatial bungalows lush green. This horrendous wastage of the natural resource shows that we falsely assume that it’s limitless. Such an assumption is further augmented by the nominal water supply charges. Unrestrained use of clean water is officially allowed for purposes other than drinking.

Concerned citizens and the state, or whatever is left of it, can at least attempt to generate a public dialogue regarding how much useable water our land of the rivers and our planet have, and how its frugal use can ensure in some measure a future for the posterity that is not waterless.

Water may not be the originating principle of life as Thales asserts but it certainly sustains life. Whether life is worth sustaining is altogether a different question. Coming generations will debate this question in the afterglow left by the sunset of our self-destructive civilisation.— soofi01@hotmail.com