Every Sunday morning in Mumbai an 88-year-old man with a bag filled with plumbing tools sets out to repair the leaking taps and pipes in his neighbourhood. Sometimes he is accompanied by a helper and sometimes he travels alone. He goes from door to door and asks residents of buildings if any water is leaking in their kitchen or bathrooms. If so, he offers to rectify the problem for free. He charges no money. All that he wants is to prevent precious water from being wasted.
This altruistic man who has a selfless concern for the environment and the society is Abid Surti who grew up in an underprivileged family. As a small child he used to see his mother waking up daily at 4 am to stand in a line to collect two buckets of water from a community borewell. Not for a single day could his mother take a break because their family depended entirely on those two buckets of water. There were often arguments and fights among the women. Those memories left a lasting imprint upon his young mind.
Pained to see wastage of water
When he grew up he saw water being wasted without care by people around him and it pained him greatly. He knew that this precious commodity was an essential part of life and should never be squandered wantonly. He founded an NGO called Drop Dead Foundation. The tagline was Save Every Drop or Drop Dead. The objective of his movement was to bring water wastage to a complete halt and make people realise the value of clean, fresh water.
“I believe in saving every drop of water because I know its value. I have been brought up on the pavements of Mumbai and I have seen people fighting for every bucket of water. My childhood is behind me, but my fight to save water has always remained with me. Every wasted drop and every leakage haunts me,” he explained to NDTV in an interview a few years ago.
Surti’s other achievements
But he is not just an ardent conservationist. He is an author, painter, journalist and a playwright. He is a graduate of the famous J.J School of Art in Mumbai. In his writing career he admits to having been influenced by the well known Bengali author Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay who wrote the novels Devdas, Parineeta and others. Surti writes in his mother tongue Gujarati and Urdu. In his writings he is fearless. In 1993 he was given a national award by the government for a short story titled Teesri Aankh.
But it is water conservation that is his main concern. With his personal interest and hard work for many years, he has managed to save 20 million litre of water according to newspaper reports. In his circles he is known as the Water Warrior. Now his body is bent and frail with age but he is determined to fight for the cause he believes in. Municipalities and corporations in every city should learn from Abid Surti. If there were more people who acted like him, much of the water scarcity, especially for poorer sections, would disappear.
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