Dining out? Bengaluru school girls tell you how you can save water!

16-year-old Garvita Gulhati and 17-year-old Pooja Tanawade from Bengaluru have launched “Why Waste,” focussing on saving water in restaurants and waste segregation at source.

Two bubbly, excited girls might be your first impression when you meet Garvita Gulhati and Pooja S. Tanawade. But there is more to the duo who are showing Bengaluru, and in fact the nation, innovative ways to a more responsible, water-secure future. As founders of the initiative “Why Waste,” they focus on saving water in restaurants, and have recently expanded their work to also address waste segregation.

Aged 16 and 17, in many ways Garvita and Pooja are like normal teenagers. Rather, they are. They like to dance, paint and love Harry Potter. As Garvita says, “I don’t think we ever noted our age when we started. I think what I learnt the most is that the best ideas come from people like us, people of our age, because we have fresh, growing and innovating minds, and the kind of exposure in the environment we are living in gives us that open base to actually think of such ideas.”

The beginning

They were first inspired to make a difference by a large garbage dump they drove past on their way to school. They shut the school bus windows to block out the stench, but as Garvita puts it, “We think of the people who actually live there. For us we can shut it out for two seconds.” The perfect idea and opportunity to do their bit for the environment came when Kuldeep Dantewadia, the founder of Reap Benefit, visited their school, the National Public School in Koramangala. That visit made the girls realise that they too could in fact take action to address the issue of waste.

Garvita and Pooja are part of the Youth Venture Programme, a global initiative led by Ashoka which recognises many such inspiring teenagers across the world. After working with over 3500 social entrepreneurs globally over the last 35 years, Ashoka realised that most of them had practiced leading social change by the age of 20.The Youth Venture Programme therefore works to empower teenagers with passion, commitment and great ideas. In India alone, the programme has worked with over 50 Youth Venturers, who started their own initiatives across the country. Over the next weeks, we will be publishing some of their stories.

“Kuldeep showed us a presentation, which said that 14 million litres of water is wasted every year just in restaurants, when we leave water behind in glasses. So that really struck and inspired us, and coincidentally, both of us went and talked to our Reap Benefit mentors on the same day, asking whether we could do something about it. And the rest is history.”

Garvita and Pooja began visiting restaurants in their area of Bangalore, encouraging them to save resources. Having received enthusiastic help from around 40 classmates, they were able to reach out to many restaurants. However, they eventually realised that the restaurants themselves can only do so much, and decided to focus more on building public awareness.

“We realised that the problem is that the customers are not going to listen to the restaurant managers, so we decided to reach out to the public first. We organised awareness campaigns in schools and apartments.” The girls designed numerous educational posters raising public awareness about the waste produced by restaurants and households. They look at these posters with pride, and justifiably so – their artistic skills and the beautiful calligraphy are impressive. Garvita’s great aunt has replicated the project in Delhi, drawing further attention to the cause.

A hand-painted poster made by the girls. Pic: Garvita Gulhati

A hand-painted poster made by the girls. Pic: Garvita Gulhati

They hope that mindsets will slowly change towards being less wasteful – for instance, that the quality of service of a restaurant would no longer be associated with the glasses being full at all times. One of their ideas is that glasses should be marked halfway, with a small quote telling people that if you waste water, it’s not a good thing. “That will get the people inspired, and they’ll fill only half the glass at a time. They might fill it five times, but it’s better than filling the full glass three times and wasting that half glass of water,” says Garvita.

New area of focus

Garvita and Pooja are now also trying to address a different problem. Having realised the difficulty in recycling household waste because of lack of waste segregation at source, they are now looking to promote and ensure waste segregation in their community, starting with households in their vicinity. For the purpose, they have created partnerships with local NGOs that collect restaurant and household waste and decompose it.

The lessons from the journey

It hasn’t always been easy. Garvita’s mother recalls, “Sometimes they were disheartened, when they came back from restaurants and said, ‘Mama, nobody is listening.’ ” Whilst many restaurants were interested in their ideas, they usually had to adhere to their policies, which made putting up posters quite difficult. Says Pooja, “I’ve learnt that it’s very hard to change people’s mentality, because they are so hung up on one thing that they don’t want to change. Starting is the hardest part. Once you’re done with the start, everything else goes well.”

Garvita and Pooja have learnt a lot from what they have done so far and their enthusiasm towards encouraging future change through their venture is unwavering. Their message to the world is, “Problems will continue to plague our planet if we cage the solutions to these issues inside us.” As Garvita says, “Be the change you wish to see. You can’t just expect things to happen, if you want to see something change, you need to get up and go take charge.”

Comments:

  1. Garvita Gulhati says:

    Thank you for the wonderful article on pooja and I… Has definitely given us the right motivation to do much more!

  2. Ashok Menon says:

    Billions in Change is an NGO with international outreach. Watch their video. You shall learn that creating awareness does not reduce pollution or food wastage. People are who they are, one needs to take right initiative to make a real change in society, and not simply create awareness campaigns. Though at this age , these kids’ work is laudable

    • Hello sir this is Garvita!
      Thank you so much for your encouragement, it means a lot to us! I just wanted to say that Why Waste? has done much more than only spread awareness. The problem that we are facing is the class of people that we address, the restaurant managers do not wish to take ideas from teenagers. We have been successful in about 4 out of the 50-60 odd restaurants we visited and continue to strive to achieve this everywhere.
      Another thing that we believe is that the best and maybe only way to prevent the water that is left behind in glasses is by telling the people to not leave it. Yes the water left can be collected and reused and are working towards a solution for that as well, but we believe that first the root cause of the problem needs to be eradicated.
      Once again thank you sir, will definitely look into what you have said.
      Another video that inspired us was the Tata Tea advertisement which says that in our country we wait for the problem to occur and then find the solution. So, our aim is to spread awareness primarily about this fact that why wait for the problem to occur when you have the ability to prevent it from occuring!

      Thanks again sir
      Kind regards

  3. Smritishiva says:

    I like your innovative ideas & I do believe that if we need the change , we have to make the beginning. .?
    Keep up your enthusiasm. .

  4. Sab says:

    Very good initiative…. Hoping that more such ventures open up in future

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