World Water Day 2013

World Water Day calls for international attention on the impact of rapid urban growth, industrialization, and uncertainties caused by climate change, conflicts, and natural disasters on urban water systems. India as a whole suffers from poor water management, with its most famous river, the Ganges, found to have 16 times the acceptable amount of coliform. Pictured: Indian children carried recyclable items from the polluted water of the Mahananda river in Siliguri on March 21.

Big Picture: World Water Day 2013

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An Indian woman got drinking water from a public tap in Allahabad, India. The UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide do not have access to 5 to 13 gallons of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.

A man brushed his teeth with water from leaking water pipes at a slum area on the outskirts of Jammu, India.

An Indian ragpicker boy drank water from a tap at an automobile yard on the outskirts of Jammu, India.

Ismael Adam drank water at the Abu Shouk camp for internally displaced persons in Darfour, Sudan, on March 19. The water point is a long walk from her shelter in the camp. Because of the labor involved and the cost of the water, she and her family must limit their consumption of water to 21 gallons per week, while a typical person in a developed nation elsewhere in the world would use, on average, 106 gallons of water per day.

Kariya Mohamed Abbakar, 50, right,arrived with jerrycans full of water at her shelter in the Abu Shouk camp.

An Indonesian man looked at a polluted waterfall on the eve of World Water Day in Bogor, Indonesia.

Foam from industrial waste floats on the polluted Tiete River in Pirapora do Bom Jesus.

Roberto da Silva bagged plastic PET containers he picked out of the polluted waters of the Tiete River in Santana do Parnaiba, Brazil. The Tiete, which flows clean from its source and becomes one of Brazil’s most polluted rivers as it receives sewage and industrial waste while passing through the center of Sao Paulo, 20 miles away, carries with it so much garbage that Da Silva manages to fish some 3 tons of recyclable plastic out of it every month, worth about $4,000 a year, he said.

A woman collected water by using a hand pump near a pond of Dala township, the outskirt of Yangon, Myanmar.

Girls loaded water buckets on their shoulders as they collected fresh water for the family near a pond at Dala township, the outskirt of Yangon, Myanmar. With the township water supply system very limited, residents mostly rely on earthen rainwater ponds of Myanmar.

Children jumped inside a public pool in Huiracocha Park, the biggest pool in Lima on March 16. The 1.5-acre pool receives thousands of bathers every summer in Lima, the second largest city in the world established in a desert, days ahead of World Water Day.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews filled water from a mountain spring to be used to bake the matzoh during the Maim Shelanu ceremony on March 14 in Jerusalem.

Residents of the overcrowded informal shack settlement of Masiphumelele throw waste water into a polluted stream next to a clean water source in Cape Town, South Africa.

A Filipino filled canisters with drinking water for sale in a poor district of Quezon City, east of Manila on March 21.