Opportunity to Save Water and Reduce Plastic Usage on Indian Railways

Environment sustainability is a highly relevant and urgent topic in the 21st century. As a global society, we all need to find ways to reduce wastage of natural resources and live in a climate conscious manner. This post highlights one easy way to do that by implementing a small change in one of the lifelines of Indian society - the Indian Railways.

Some time back I was travelling from Delhi to Dehradun in Shatabdi express. It was an overall great experience in terms of booking, services, timeliness, catering, and so on by Indian Railways.

However, I observed that at start of journey every passenger is given a 1 Litre water bottle. All Shatabdi trains are air conditioned and the water consumption of people is expected to be lower in the cold environment.

I observed that by the time we were about to reach our destination, very few passengers had finished the bottle (hardly 10%). Most of the passengers had utilized less than half bottle (almost 70%) and some did not even open it (almost 20%). After arriving at the destination, most of them left the bottles at their seats, which posed additional danger of misuse of bottles and leftover water.

Assuming 100 trains per day carrying 500 passengers, 365 days a year it turns out to be more that 18 Million Litres of water and plastic of 18 Million bottles, with large portion of water getting wasted and huge amount of plastic getting into the system. Nowhere in the world in any mode of transport, water is provided with so much of luxury.

Installing water dispensers in the trains can reduce wastage of water as well as plastic used to produce the water bottles leading to a positive impact on the environment.

I believe this issue can be easily addressed by putting mineral water dispensers in every train coach and providing paper glasses to passengers, who can drink clean water as per their convenience. I am sure this will be appreciated and welcomed by all commuters without any complains.

Not to mention it will result in multiple advantages in terms of reduced wastage of a precious resource - water, huge reduction in use of plastic bottles (big environmental issue), without any significant inconvenience to the passengers.

I would suggest Indian Railways to take an urgent note of this and take immediate action to change this practice.

For Share and Like – use below links

For any Services or further Insights/ Support - Contact using form below

This article was originally published on LinkedIn in 2019. Click on the link to find the post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evivek_wastage-water-plastic-activity-6591611904576323584-4N77