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INDIA: Delhi Water Disputes Come to a Boil

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 21 2005 (IPS) - Delayed monsoon rains and scorching summer temperatures have triggered water disputes in the Indian capital vicious enough to remind administrators that they urgently need to do a better job of managing existing resources of the wet stuff.

Residents of upmarket areas of New Delhi waved empty buckets and braved ambient temperatures of well over 40 degrees Celsius to block traffic and show their anger over taps that began to run dry two weeks ago.

There were incidents of irate residents beating up lower-level officials of the state-run water utility Delhi Jal Board (DJB) after they could give no assurance as to when the water supply might be regularised.

”This crisis is the result of poor planning and misuse – the DJB cannot account for 45 percent of the water that it releases,” said A.K. Jain, a senior planning official with the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

Jain is one official who has been calling for greater accountability in water use and for the promotion of water-harvesting to recharge ground water, which is severely depleted from hundreds of thousands of tube wells that desperate residents have illegally bored into their backyards.

This summer’s severe shortages have finally spurred authorities to announce that all tube wells would soon be licensed and user fees charged. Official surveys have revealed that at least 400,000 tube wells exist across the city, and only about 160,000 have permits.

Unlicensed tube wells are only one aspect of a free-for-all attitude toward a resource shared by the city’s 14 million inhabitants, with those who have the clout or the ingenuity cornering most of the water supplies, while others find it hard just to get enough water to drink.

”The priority should be on ensuring that people get assured supplies of drinking water rather than attending to the huge demands of the commercial or industrial sector,” says Arvind Kejriwal, who runs Parivartan (a name meaning ”change”), a New Delhi citizens’ group specialising in reform through the people’s right to information.

Average daily per capita water consumption in areas encompassed by the posh New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) area is around 400 litres, while people living in the rest of the sprawling city get about 20 litres per person.

In many residential areas it is the general practice for people to install ”on-line boosters,” or powerful pumps fitted into the plumbing to coax water into their homes. They are not deterred by the fact that such fittings are completely illegal.

”What do you expect us to do? Go without water? Everybody has these pumps,” said a housewife who declared she had no plans to remove her booster unless her neighbours were prepared to do likewise.

Officials have reported the collapse of mainline pipes from the combined vacuum pressure created by hundreds of online pumps being operated together but have shied away from taking action for so long that the installations have acquired a legitimacy of sorts.

An engineer with the DJB said the utility was reluctant to impose penalties because consumers who would get little or no water without the pumps. ”We are waiting for augmentation of supplies from the Tehri dam expected later this year before taking action against these boosters,” he said.

Hopes that water from the recently completed Tehri dam, located 300 kms to the north in the Himalayan state of Uttaranchal, would be available in the national capital this year receded after a conduit built through marshy terrain suddenly gave way and one of the tunnels of the dam itself showed engineering snags.

But there are other problems as well. Environmentalists led by the renowned activist Sunderlal Bahuguna have warned that Tehri, the world’s biggest rock-filled dam, has been built on a seismically active zone in the Himalayas and poses a danger to populations living downstream, including residents of the national capital.

Farmers’ groups banded together under the Dehat Morcha (Village Movement) have been protesting against large-scale diversion of waters from the Himalayan river system to the urban areas, fearing that their rich farmlands would suffer as a result of what is officially called the Sonia Vihar project.

The fact that contracts for the project begun in 2000 have been bagged by Ondeo Degremont, a subsidiary of the global water giant Suez Lyonnaise, under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) arrangement with DJB, has raised the suspicions of leading environmental groups.

It does not help that the terms of the contract are a closely guarded secret and that Ondeo Degremont officials do not take questions from the press, even when some of its workers died in an accident a couple of years ago.

The water crisis in the national capital only reflects the serious water stress building up in different parts of the country, including western Rajasthan state, where police shot dead five farmers earlier this month after they obstructed traffic to protest against the failure of authorities to release water into irrigation canals.