The water mafia now steals more than 50%
As darkness descends over Dharavi in Mumbai, a few local slum dwellers creep out of their shanties grasping steel ewers and plastic cans, scrambling over an iron railing fence across the railway lines to meet a crowd around a faucet in a desolate patch on the other side. The place is already burbling with an intense scuttle for water. The hitch? It’s basically the water mafia’s stolen water for sale — this particular faucet draws water from a water tank that belongs to Indian Railways! Such pilfering of water is going on for decades in our largest metropolis, as it struggles to quench the thirst of its ever growing population. Mumbai’s 19 million people demand 6,916 million litres a day; while the city’s limited capacity can provide only 2,900 million litres. The future looks really bleak as the city’s civic authority has warned that its primary water reservoirs have only 71 billion litres of water, enough only to last 200 days. It’s a wobbly situation as state government announced in December last year that water connection will not be provided to high-rise buildings until 2012. To tackle the misery, the state government is in a process to set up three new water reservoirs and a desalination plant. But these steps however, do not deal with the main problem of pilfering, because of which the city looses one-fifth of its water supply. The water mafia operating as commercial water tankers creates false scarcity to enhance their business in connivance with some Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials. In spite of BMC trying to curb the menace, stopping theft is easier said than done — as there is no one to monitor the fissures in the pipelines made by mafias and local leather factories for their business.
The scenario in Delhi is similar — as Delhi Jal Board (DJB) guarantees enough water for its residents — throwing open the question for the reason of scarcity, which in that case seems to be artificially created. It’s the stolen water meant for public usage that is sold back to them by the private operators. Delhi, as per official figures, has 220 litres viz. eleven buckets of water per capita per day — yet there is no accountability of 330 million gallons of water — the government says it loses 50 per cent of its water supply, but cannot explain how! After the loss, the government is left with 110 litres of water per capita per day — which is an absolute shocker!
It is a losing battle in almost every city to try and stop water mafia’s illegal extraction of water and supplying them at a soaring price. Taking out groundwater from their wells and trading it to tanker owners for Rs.100/ per load is a full time business for farmers in the outskirts of Chennai, so much so, that they have given up their original livelihood of agriculture. Is privatisation the answer? People like Alfredo Pascual of Asian Development Bank do think that the private sector “does have a valid role to play—not as the owner of water resources but in providing the much-needed expertise.” That seems to long in coming. For now, we have a parched throat.
As darkness descends over Dharavi in Mumbai, a few local slum dwellers creep out of their shanties grasping steel ewers and plastic cans, scrambling over an iron railing fence across the railway lines to meet a crowd around a faucet in a desolate patch on the other side. The place is already burbling with an intense scuttle for water. The hitch? It’s basically the water mafia’s stolen water for sale — this particular faucet draws water from a water tank that belongs to Indian Railways! Such pilfering of water is going on for decades in our largest metropolis, as it struggles to quench the thirst of its ever growing population. Mumbai’s 19 million people demand 6,916 million litres a day; while the city’s limited capacity can provide only 2,900 million litres. The future looks really bleak as the city’s civic authority has warned that its primary water reservoirs have only 71 billion litres of water, enough only to last 200 days. It’s a wobbly situation as state government announced in December last year that water connection will not be provided to high-rise buildings until 2012. To tackle the misery, the state government is in a process to set up three new water reservoirs and a desalination plant. But these steps however, do not deal with the main problem of pilfering, because of which the city looses one-fifth of its water supply. The water mafia operating as commercial water tankers creates false scarcity to enhance their business in connivance with some Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials. In spite of BMC trying to curb the menace, stopping theft is easier said than done — as there is no one to monitor the fissures in the pipelines made by mafias and local leather factories for their business.
The scenario in Delhi is similar — as Delhi Jal Board (DJB) guarantees enough water for its residents — throwing open the question for the reason of scarcity, which in that case seems to be artificially created. It’s the stolen water meant for public usage that is sold back to them by the private operators. Delhi, as per official figures, has 220 litres viz. eleven buckets of water per capita per day — yet there is no accountability of 330 million gallons of water — the government says it loses 50 per cent of its water supply, but cannot explain how! After the loss, the government is left with 110 litres of water per capita per day — which is an absolute shocker!
It is a losing battle in almost every city to try and stop water mafia’s illegal extraction of water and supplying them at a soaring price. Taking out groundwater from their wells and trading it to tanker owners for Rs.100/ per load is a full time business for farmers in the outskirts of Chennai, so much so, that they have given up their original livelihood of agriculture. Is privatisation the answer? People like Alfredo Pascual of Asian Development Bank do think that the private sector “does have a valid role to play—not as the owner of water resources but in providing the much-needed expertise.” That seems to long in coming. For now, we have a parched throat.
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