WATER

WATER

1.The average worldwide use of water per person is around six hundred and fifty cubic meters per year. But the average water usage in North America is one thousand and nine hundred cubic meters, while it is two hundred and fifty cubic meters in Africa. One cubic meter is one thousand liters or about 40 normal sized buckets.

2.Nearly ninety seven percent of all the world's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable. Another two percent is locked in ice caps and glaciers. That leaves one percent for all our needs.

3.Approximately, ten  liters of water are required to manufacture a liter of gasoline, one thousand liters of water are required to grow one kilogram of potatoes and an astounding two lac and ninety five thousand liters of water are required to produce nine hundred kilogram of paper!

4.Almost seventy percent of the available freshwater in the world is used for agriculture. It takes almost one to three cubic meters of water to produce one kilogram of rice.

5.Water enters the atmosphere by a process known as evaporation, and then by condensation forms clouds. Finally, through precipitation, the water falls back down to Earth. This cycle, called the  hydro-logic cycle repeats itself endlessly.

6.A drop of water will usually spend nine days in the hydro-logic cycle but once it falls, it can spend many years before getting into the cycle again.

7.The hydro-logic cycle uses more energy in a day than humanity has created or used throughout it's entire history.

8.The area of the inland Aral sea in central Asia decreased by sixty percent between 1960 and 2000 while it's salinity (the amount of salt in the water) increased by three hundred and eighty percent.

9. Excessive use of groundwater through tube wells and pumps has led to a situation where use of groundwater exceeds natural replenishment by at least one hundred and sixty billion cubic meters a year.

10.1.1 billion people lack access to improved water supply and 2.4 billion to improved sanitation. Those who lack adequate and affordable water supply are the poorest in society.

11.There are now about forty five thousand large dams in operation in the world. The total area submerged by these dams is more than four lac square kilometers! About twenty percent of the world's freshwater species are either extinct or endangered.

12. About forty to eighty million people have been displaced by dams around the world. These people have been forced to give up their traditional habitats and to relocate to less productive lands.

13.Besides the impact on people, large dams have led to loss of forests, wildlife habitat and also aquatic life. Mini-hydro power  plants are proving to be far cheaper to build and have a minimum impact on the  environment.

14.Almost twenty three thousand million liters of waste water is generated in India per day out of which only about six thousand million liters is treated. This means that about seventeen thousand liters of waste water is dumped into our rivers every day.

15.Pollution of the oceans is also increasing as land-based factories and urban societies deposit their wastes into the sea. The hazardous chemicals deposited in the water enter the marine food chain and as they travel up the food chain, their concentrations build up gradually to dangerous levels.

16.A devastating example of this effect was the Minimata Bay disaster in Japan where a factory was discharging waste containing mercury in low concentrations into the sea. By the time the mercury reached the fish, it had reached toxic levels. As result of this, about seven hundred people died from mercury poisoning and many thousands were taken ill.

17.River pollution is another major concern because most of the drinking water on Earth comes from the rivers. With an increase in the use of chemical  fertilizers, the concentrations of nitrate and phosphates in the river increase as the agricultural waste flows into the river.

18.Algae use these chemicals to multiply and grow rapidly, creating a green layer on the surface. This tremendous growth of algae is called eutrophication. When the algae die, they provide food for bacteria whose number increase explosively. The huge numbers of bacteria use up all the oxygen in the water thus causing the death of many aquatic animals.

19.About forty percent of the world's four hundred million children of school-going age are infected with intestinal from poor sanitation and hygiene. This is responsible for more than two million deaths per year.

20.Water-related diseases are a growing human tragedy, killing more than five million people each year-ten times the number of people killed in wars. About 2.3 billion people suffer from diseases linked to dirty water. About sixty percent of all infant mortality worldwide is linked to infectious and parasitic diseases, most of them are water related.

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