NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 2 Salt water, freshwater and water scarcity — THINK ABOUT IT
Book page 31 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
If there is such abundance of water on the planet, why is there so much talk of ‘water scarcity’ or a ‘water crisis’?
Answer
Because almost none of that water is water we can actually use. There is plenty of water, but very little usable freshwater.
All the water on the Earth = 100 parts
About 97 parts are in the oceans → salty, unfit for drinking, for crops or for most land animals
Only about 3 parts are freshwater
And of those 3 parts, roughly two-thirds is frozen in glaciers and polar ice, and most of the rest is underground
What is left in rivers, lakes and ponds is less than 1% of all the water on Earth
The 3% that is fresh, opened out. Almost all of it is locked in ice or lies deep underground.
On top of that, four things make the shortage worse:
It is unevenly spread. Cherrapunji gets several metres of rain a year while Jaisalmer gets a few centimetres. Water is not where the people are.
It is unevenly spread in time. Most of India's rain falls in the four monsoon months; the other eight months depend on what we managed to store.
We use more and more of it — for irrigation, factories, cities and swimming pools — and we pump out groundwater faster than the rain can refill it.
We spoil what we have. Sewage, factory waste and pesticides make river and well water unfit to drink, so the usable share shrinks further.
The one-line answer: the Earth is not short of water — it is short of clean freshwater in the right place at the right time.
Q2.
What ways of saving water are you aware of? Which ones have you seen practised at home, at your school, and in your village, town or city?
Answer
Water is saved in three ways: use less, use it twice, and catch and store the rain.
Where
What can be done
At home
Close the tap while brushing teeth or soaping; a bucket bath instead of a shower; repair leaking taps and flush tanks at once; reuse the water in which rice or vegetables were washed for the plants; reuse RO reject water for mopping; wash clothes in a full load, not a half-empty one.
At school
Push-taps or half-turn taps at the washing area; a rooftop rainwater harvesting pipe leading to a storage tank or a recharge pit; a kitchen garden watered with waste water from the hand-wash basin; a monitor who reports dripping taps.
In a village
Rebuilding village tanks and ponds — the talab, johad, bawdi, kere and eri; check dams and contour bunds to slow the run-off; drip and sprinkler irrigation instead of flooding the field; growing millets, which need far less water than paddy or sugarcane.
In a town or city
Compulsory rainwater harvesting in new buildings; repairing leaking supply pipes; treating and reusing wastewater for parks and construction; reviving city lakes; metering so that water is not wasted.
Sample answer: “At home we keep a bucket under the tap while the water warms up and use it for the plants. In our school there is a rainwater pipe from the roof to a tank behind the office. In our village the panchayat repaired the old pond last year, and now the wells nearby do not dry up in May.”
Why saving beats searching: a leaking tap dripping once a second wastes roughly 15–20 litres a day — over 5,000 litres a year from one tap. Fixing it costs almost nothing; finding 5,000 litres of new water costs a great deal.