Water Bowls Project In Mumbai:

Narrated by Sarita Raturi. Contact her for more info at idaindia@ymail.com

Safe water to drink for stray animals is almost impossible for animals to find on the streets of Mumbai. I decided to do something about it in May'09 and gave away plastic Buckets to shop keepers to fill water in every street of Ghatkopar east. On my next visit in Oct'09, when I checked how this is working out, I was told all buckets had disappeared. This led to my thinking on how to provide water to animals and I came up with cement bowls to be cemented on the ground itself and to be taken care of by animal lovers/Volunteers in different areas of Mumbai. With this idea in mind I looked for people in Mumbai and there came an Angel to help me in my mission and she was Sharmee Bhatt. We called this Sarita & Sharmee's Water bowls project.

This "S & S Water Bowls project" has now become successful in the western suburb. We were able to contact volunteers who were interested in taking care of these bowls once they were installed and filled them with water everyday. We have over 120 Water bowls already installed and filled with water. Many more will be installed in the coming weeks.  We have a simple Excel database with every volunteer's name and contact details so we can keep in touch with them periodically. One of the volunteers who takes care of 3 of our bowls said that dogs used to drink for the gutters. The water would be pink one day, then orange, then black as there are many chemical factories around that poured their waste into these gutters. The dogs in her area now  have clean water to drink from :-)

Hope someone reads this write-up and replicates this project in their areas too. I spoke about my project to Rahul Jindal and Kajal Shah of Navi Mumbai and they have installed 25 water bowls already.They intend covering all of Navi Mumbai with hundreds of bowls of water this summer. We handed over some Water bowls to Paws for installing in Dombivli and Thane areas too. I request each an every reader of this article to do something similar in their area.

Thanks for reading this article and taking action!!!