City girl on Future 50 list

Garvita Gulhati has been campaigning to save water since she was 15

Twenty-two-year-old Garvita Gulhati from Bengaluru has won another recognition for her campaign to save water.

Project Management Institute, a not-for-profit professional organisation for project management in the US, has featured her on its 2022 Future 50 list of changemakers who turned social impact ideas into a reality.

A Koramangala resident, Garvita was 15 when she started ‘GlassHalfFull’, an initiative to urge restaurants to serve half a glass of water and refill if diners request. About 14 million litres of water is left behind in glasses every year around the world, she had read.

She says over five lakh restaurants in India have adopted the concept since and prevented the wastage of 10 million litres of water.

Collaboration with the National Restaurants Association of India was a key driver.

This consolidated as a youth-led organisation to conserve water, called Why Waste?, of which she is the founder and CEO. Last year, they launched the Why Waste? app for people to calculate their water footprint and save 100 litres of water daily.

Her work has won her a spot on the ‘Forbes 30 under 30’ list and the #OneForChange series by National Geographic.

Garvita was in the middle of flood-relief efforts in Bengaluru when we contacted her on Tuesday. She felt the extreme rains were an outcome of climate change but added “the economy-over-ecology approach to development, failure to implement rainwater harvesting and poor management of drainage systems” are failing our cities.

“We know what the problem is and we know it (the ecological crisis) is going to get worse, so why are we waiting for it to become a bane? Why are we not doing our part?” she exhorts people to take eco-friendly initiatives.