India: Get ready for another chronic water shortage this summer
By Indulekha Aravind
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When it comes to water supply in urban areas in India, there is no dearth of alarming statistics. Last year, government think-tank Niti Aayog, in its report, issued the dire warning that 21 cities including Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai will run out of groundwater by 2020, which would affect about 100 million people. A few months before that, Centre for Science and Environment published a report predicting that 10 cities around the world, including Bengaluru, were likely to face Day Zero when taps there would run dry, like the situation Cape Town in South Africa got very close to.
Dipping groundwater levels across the country have been a cause for concern over the years, as extraction of the resource largely continues unchecked to meet the demands of a growing population. The bulk of this is used in farming.
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Municipal governments have been focusing primarily on supply side management to the total neglect of demand side measures such as metered water supply, says Tushaar Shah, senior fellow at the International Water Management Institute. He attributes India’s urban water supply crisis partly to this. “Our water supply infrastructure has also failed to keep pace with growth of the urban centres, with water conveyance losses exceedingly high. And the inadequacy of public systems to meet demand has given rise to a massive informal water economy that is hard to regulate and control,” says Shah. The monopoly of private water tankers in Bellandur is one instance of this.
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