Maharashtra has a water problem. It is not a problem of infrastructure alone. It is a problem of behaviour, embedded in daily routines so familiar that most adults do not notice it. A tap is running while dishes are soaking. A bucket was overfilled and left. Water pressure left unchecked during bathing. These are not the habits of people who are indifferent to conservation. They are the habits of people who have stopped seeing them. Lokmat and AGENCY09 identified a mechanism to make them visible again: put a child in front of a camera and ask them what they see at home.
The Insight
The campaign is built on a single, documented contradiction. Children in Maharashtra are taught about water conservation in school. They learn about the crisis, the statistics, and the responsibility. They carry that knowledge home and watch the adults around them, parents, relatives, and household helpers, behave in ways that directly contradict everything they have been taught. The subconscious habits of water wastage that adults no longer register are visible to the children living alongside them, precisely because children have recently been told to look.
AGENCY09’s creative concept, developed by Tushar Khakhar and Saheb Singh, used that gap as the campaign’s primary mechanism. The brief was not to tell adults they were wasting water. It was to show them what their children had already noticed.
The Film
The film uses a vox-pop format, the style borrowed from street interview segments familiar from news and entertainment television, to have children speak candidly about the water habits they observe at home. Each child describes a specific, recognisable behaviour. The family helper who lets the tap run. The parent who fills containers far past what is needed. The bucket left running in the bathroom. None of the children is angry or accusatory. They are matter-of-fact, which is significantly more effective. They are describing observations, not making complaints.
The emotional impact arrives from the contrast between how casually the children describe these habits and how clearly the habits contradict the conservation messaging those same children have received in school. The adult viewer is not the villain of the film. They are the person the child is describing without judgment, which is harder to deflect than an accusation.
The film closes with a statistical reveal presenting the scale of India’s water crisis, anchoring the domestic observations in their national context. The initiative is positioned under the hashtag #JalNahiTohKalNahi, translating directly as “No Water, No Tomorrow.” The campaign was developed for Lokmat, Maharashtra’s largest Marathi-language newspaper, in collaboration with Rin under its Jal Samruddh Maharashtra platform.
Why Children as the Messenger
Conservation messaging directed at adults typically functions through guilt or aspiration. Either it makes people feel bad about existing behaviour, or it presents an idealised version of responsible behaviour for them to adopt. Both approaches operate from outside the viewer’s daily life. The Lokmat Rin campaign operates from inside it.
Children carry no authority over adult behaviour. They cannot enforce conservation. They cannot fine, legislate, or sanction. What they can do, as this campaign demonstrates, is observe without the social editing that adults apply to their own behaviour. When a child describes what happens in a home, the description is unfiltered by the defensiveness that makes adults dismiss external criticism. The viewer recognises the behaviour because the child is describing it as a fact rather than a failing.
The campaign’s strategy notes make the underlying logic explicit: behavioural change starts at home, yet adults are often the biggest violators of resource conservation. While children are taught about sustainability in school, they witness the opposite at home. To truly drive a message of conservation, the campaign needed to show that the next generation is observing every move.
The Context in Maharashtra
Maharashtra’s water scarcity is not a future projection. Multiple districts in the state experience chronic shortages annually, with groundwater levels in several regions declining consistently over the past decade. Urban consumption patterns in cities like Pune and Mumbai co-exist with acute shortages in rural areas of Marathwada and Vidarbha, where drought-related distress remains a recurring crisis. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis outlined river-linking projects and village-level conservation efforts as the state’s strategy for resolving the crisis. Municipal-level water supply remains inconsistent across large portions of the state.
The campaign does not engage with policy or infrastructure. It works at the household level, which is where the behavioural gap the children describe actually lives. The institutional problem requires institutional solutions. The daily habits addressed in the film require a different kind of intervention, one that begins with recognition. The children in the film are doing exactly that.
Campaign Name: Jal Samruddh Maharashtra / #JalNahiTohKalNahi
Agency Name: AGENCY09 / Production: KissMyAss Productions
Brand Name: Lokmat (in collaboration with Rin)
Location: Maharashtra, India
