If you’ve travelled by train in India, you have almost certainly used this invention. 

You are on an Indian Railways train, somewhere between stations, and you step into the washroom to wash your hands. The tap does not turn or twist. You simply push it with a short, firm press and water flows. 

But the moment you let go, it stops. No dripping, no running and no water pooling on the floor because someone walked away without closing it.

Most people press it, wash their hands, and think nothing of it. But that small, spring-loaded tap has a name, a birthplace, and an inventor. It is called the Jaison Water Tap, it was born in Travancore in the early twentieth century, and the man who made it was not an engineer, but an insurance officer who got tired of watching water go to waste.

The problem no one thought to fix

India has nearly 17% of the world’s population but only 4% of its freshwater. By 2050, half of the country’s districts could face severe water shortages. Globally, we lose 324 billion cubic metres of freshwater every year, enough to meet the needs of 280 million people, according to the World Bank.

A century ago, JP Subramonya Iyer saw the most obvious form of this problem on Travancore’s roadsides: public taps left open, water running freely into the ground while no one benefited.

That carelessness hasn’t gone away. Today, about one in three people in India leaves a tap running, wasting around five litres a minute. This adds up to roughly 49 billion litres of water........

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