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o The following particular account may not apply directly to Jains but nonetheless is quite instructive. About fifteen years ago, I had a chance to meet with the Minister of Health and Environment in the Delhi State Administration. He shared a story about how water in certain parts of Delhi has been made poisonous and unfit for human consumption for hundreds of years. In one suburb of Delhi (the Bahadar Garh area), there are a large number of small yarn factories that do coloring of the yarns using color dyes. After the color is spent, (just like in the example of the City of Pali above), these shops used to throw the spent water on the street in front of their shops thus not only causing mud, stagnant water puddles, mosquitoes, and unsafe walking conditions, but pollution, too. Seeing this, Delhi Government hired a tanker and asked all the shops to deliver the impure water to this tanker.
After collecting all this toxic water, the tanker was supposed to take this water to the Delhi Government Central water treatment facility. The shop owners had to pay a small fee to the government based on the amount of the spent water to be treated. The shop owners came up with a clever idea to avoid all this hassle. They did deliver some quantity of water to the tanker but then instructed the driver of the tanker to open the water valve/tap of the tanker a little to make it intentionally leak some water, and then drive the tanker all day long; thus, instead of the water being taken to the central treatment facility, it was then sprayed and dumped on the streets of Delhi via this leaking valve.
The government realized this and threatened the shop owners with stiffer consequences. Now, many of the same shop owners, drilled holes into the ground and put pipes inside their own shops, where they then freely discharged their spent waters this way instead of on the streets or to the central water treatment facility. As a result, the Minister told me that the underground water is now so pollutedand poisoned that by his account, it will be unsafe to drink for several hundred years.
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An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
