Draft Water Policy calls for Recycling - Consumption Must Come Down, Losses Should Be Cut

Draft water policy calls for Recycling
Consumption Must Come Down, Losses Should Be Cut
Neha Lalchandani TNN

New Delhi: Delhi’s draft policy on water has a strong focus on demand management, suggesting that per capita consumption in the city should decrease from the present average of 172 litres per capital per day (lpcd) by a minimum of 10 litres each decade. With limited fresh water sources, the capital also needs to shift focus to recycling and reuse of waste water and curtailing distribution losses. 

Delhi Jal Board’s 12th Five Year Plan Approach Paper has projected a demand of 1,140 million gallons per day by 2017 for a projected population of 190 million. 

The report prepared by Intach and still in the discussion stage says DJB is currently supplying 822 MGD of water which is an average of 220 lpcd. However, the supply is highly inequitable with Delhi Cantt getting 509 lpcd, NDMC areas being supplied 440 lpcd and outer Delhi areas getting as little as 40 lpcd. 

Delhi also has an extremely high level of non-revenue water which includes that lost en route to distribution points and that which is either stolen or supplied to areas that are not metered. The National Water Policy has directed that an acceptable figure of losses is 15%. 

Shifting focus from supply to demand will entail reduction in present per capita consumption. The Intach report suggests that Delhi should reduce its per capita consumption of 172 lpcd by a minimum of 10 litres every decade. The possible additions to Delhi’s supply are Munak Canal which will supply 80 MGD and Renuka Dam which, if commissioned in part, will supply 150 MGD and, if fully, an additional 275 MGD. Two other dams that could increase Delhi’s supply are Kishau and Lakhway Vyasi with 372 MGD and 185 MGD, respectively. 

However, keeping in mind changing climatic conditions, increase in demandand the fact that Delhi is a riparian state in water sharing agreements, it needs to increase its dependency on recycled water resources. The report suggests that recycled water should form 25% of supply by 2017, 50% by 2022 and a minimum of 80% by 2027. 

DJB CEO Debashree Mukherjee said that one way of reducing demand is by increasing tariff. “For that we are looking at volumetric tariff and full metering by 2020. People should know how much they consume and what they should pay for their consumption. Secondly, awareness building is also our prime focus,” she said.
It is essential to increase availability of water by controlling distribution losses. A maximum permissible loss of only 10% should be permitted by 2025. Delhi’s dependency on ground water also needs to be reduced, especially since its level across the city has dropped to alarmingly low levels. The policy advocates passing of the ground water bill that will give the state more control on ground water resources. It says that aquifer exploitation should be neutralized by 2020 and attain full recovery to 1990 levels by 2030. 

A Water Resources Commission will be set up. Its mandate will be to deal with the regulatory aspects of water and monitoring of policies. 

The commission would “coordinate the actions of all agencies involved with water services, resource management, river issues, foster technological and administrative and financial innovations, track developments in the northern river basins, track climate change impacts on resources, benchmark performance on policy parameters and act as a pricing regulator”. 

A strong focus of the policy is also on development and maintenance of water bodies and river Yamuna. Water quality of the river needs to be improved to bathing quality by 2020.

MAIN AGENDA UNDER WATER POLICY STATEMENT
Priority to water allocation | Demand management | Recycled water resources | Access to water for all | Controlling distribution losses | Aquifer management | Database management | Institutional organization | River-related issues | Public education and awareness

Delhi groundwater will run dry in 3-5 yrs

HIGH AND DRY
Delhi groundwater will run dry in 3-5 yrs: Study
Situation In Other Metros Also Alarming, Says NGRI

Bappa Majumdar & Sunil Mungara TNN 

Hyderabad: This is sounds like crisis. Scientists at the premier National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) have said groundwater in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, along with several other northern cities, are declining at such a rapid pace that in three years the Andhra Pradesh capital will be almost bone dry.
“History shows us civilizations have vanished once water is also gone. Water carries people and we need to wake up now and do something before it is too late,” Mrinal Kanti Sen, director of NGRI told TOI on Tuesday.
Staring at an acute crisis, NGRI has been asked by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) under the ministry of water resources to trace new aquifers using heliborne electromagnetic techniques in the states of Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Bihar and Rajasthan.
“The government is concerned and we are gearing up to find new aquifers all over the country as this is the only way out,” says Sen.
In Hyderabad, despite a very good 2011 monsoon, water levels in places like Sanjeevareddy Nagar and Maredpally were at a depth of just about 18 metres; the situation in other observatory zones are equally bad.
Hydrogeologists at NGRI and government water board officials say that with cities turning into concrete jungles very little rain water is getting infiltrated into the earth for conversion into groundwater.
“In an ideal scenario, at least 16% of total rainfall must seep into the earth to get recharged as groundwater, but in cities such as Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai barely half of it does. This is very alarming,” says Dr SN Rai, a top scientist at NGRI.
“It is going to go down further, and at this rate Hyderabad will the first to run dry in three years time. Delhi will be next and may run dry in three to five years. There is a bleak future in store for other metros,” adds Rai, also the vice president of International Association of Hydrogeologists.
NGRI scientists say the scenario in Delhi, western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan are very bad with groundwater in 20 out of 27 tehsils in Delhi receding rapidly.
A two-year CGWB study shows that groundwater use in Delhi was upto 12,569 hectare metres (HM) against an extremely poor recharge of 2,652- 4,172 hm per tehsil.
Vasant Vihar, Hauz Khas, Chankayapuri, along with Karol Bagh, Kotwali, Kalakji, Rajouri Garden and Paharganj, are among the worst exploited areas, officials say. Rampant digging of bore wells and poor water recharge areas due to construction of buildings are the reasons, they offer.
In Mumbai, civic bodies are resorting to artificial rains as the city’s water collection and storage is nearly 30 percent deficient; water needs can be handled only till February 2013.
CGWB officials say they have plans to revive 8000-10,000 old wells and hundreds of ring wells instead of the current trend of bore wells which does not help in water recharge.The only bright spot in Mumbai is that water levels in the lakes are higher than what it was last time, scientists say.
The scenario in the southern metro of Chennai isn’t happy either, with hydrogeologists saying that the already declining groundwater level has been contaminated due to over exploitation. In fact, CGWB says that 247 out of 451 water samples taken from all districts of Tamil Nadu showed high levels of chloride, fluoride and nitrate — all very harmful for humans.
The situation looked dangerous in towns like Perambalur, Namakkal, Salem and Vellore, officials say. In some of the areas, officials are using air compressors instead of pumps to draw groundwater.
“If Hyderabad is the worst, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai have huge water worries of their own. Unless local governments and people learn to conserve water and think about our next generation, it’s all downhill from here,” says Dr Rai.
Scientists say every big household in the city needs a minimum 3 x 10 feet pit to collect rain water from the roof and divert it to the pits for recharge. Ramesh Kumar, deputy director at the Andhra Pradesh groundwater department, says that indiscriminate digging of bore wells, and encroachment of lakes and water tanks are the prime culprits. The city has only 300-odd lakes remaining out of 900 plus in the late 1960s.
“As a result we are forced to get water from Nagarjunasagar, about 140 km away from the city, to meet water demand,” says Kumar. “Hyderabad will run dry and there is no doubt about it if this trend continues.”
(Source: Times of India, Dec 19 2012)

The disappearing water of Delhi. More serious than you think

Reported by Radhika Bordia, Edited by Janaki Fernandes | Updated: July 27, 2012 17:13 IST

New Delhi:  In a country where a woman's 'suhaag', her husband, is seen as central to her existence, imagine a song where a woman, driven to desperation, says it's easier to lose him than her precious pitcher of water. This was a song we filmed in Banda, Bundelkhand, 16 years ago, when we travelled to Uttar Pradesh. The water shortage appeared apocalyptic then, even for this under-developed part of India.  But since then, Banda's thirst has become starker.  
In 1997, the Centre for Science and Environment, published 'Dying Wisdom:  The Rise, Fall and Potential of Traditional Water Harvesting Systems'. It beautifully mapped the acumen with which communities across the country once conserved their water resources. At the book's launch, when we interviewed the CSE director at the time, the late Anil Agarwal, he emphasized how urgent the need was for us to revert to our older water-harvesting techniques as well as develop newer ones.  The book was widely-read and for a while, it seemed that policy-makers would take note. Yet, 15 years passed before some laws were put into place to make rainwater harvesting mandatory. The Delhi government, for instance, constantly reiterates its commitment to do rainwater harvesting but when we set out to do a water profiling of the city, we found a disturbing mismatch between intention and reality. 
Dhiraj Ahuja runs a company called Delhi Tubewells Limited. In 1994 when his company dug a tubewell for a house they had to go down approximately 60 feet to get water. By 2011, for the same home,  they had to go as deep as 250 feet to hit water. "In some places we only had to dig 30 feet and we would hit water, today when we are called to bore wells, even after going down 300 feet we don't get any water." It's a candid confession from a man who has profited greatly from a dangerous water policy which allowed unchecked tubewell-boring for decades. 
From the mid-sixties, both the government and home owners have bored their own water supplies, deep into the earth, sucking out Delhi's ground water in massive quantities. "See those are tubewell pipes pulled out of the ground as the wells have dried up,' Dhiraj Ahuja points to piles of dug up borewell pipes, now lying unused and rusting. 
Frantic laws are now being formulated to try and reverse the damage. In neighbouring Gurgaon, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has barred the Haryana government and its agencies from allowing any construction till real estate developers commit that they will use water tankers for building their projects.  Ground water will be off-limits.  The construction lobby has been badly hit by this. According to the Central Groundwater Authority (CGA), Gurgaon was illegally extracting as much as 50 million gallons of water per day - taking out from the ground three  times the amount of water it replenished. The CGWA warned that by if this was not stopped Gurgaon would have no groundwater left by 2017. 
In Delhi , a law passed in 2005 makes it mandatory for all tubewells to be registered with the government, but the Centre for Science and Environment reveals that only 100,000 tubewells are on the records -experts say  at least double that amount are not documented. Regulating illegal tubewells is next to impossible as almost all our households have them and there is no one agency or government body tasked to monitor this.
Private householders argue that tubewells are the only option as the Delhi Jal Board, in charge of the city's water supply, simply does not provide adequate water. At the moment The Jal Board, a civic body mandated to provide water, supplies piped water to about 75% of Delhi's population which means many parts of the city has no connections. Those who do have water connections say the supply is erratic. Statistics also reveal how unequally the water has been distributed. Take a look at this - 70% of Delhi's total municipal water goes to the privileged Delhi Cantonment area, which means that less than 5% of a city's population guzzles up an entire city's water supply.

Vast areas like the ones we visited were completely left out of the Jal Board's ambit. In Madangir, a sprawling semi-urban, densely populated area, there are few Jal Board connections, leaving the residents dependent on a corrupt water tanker mafia. This is a scenario well-documented, with stories of long waits, water fights and large scale corruption. 'I have to pay almost Rs 2000 a month for water, you tell me how am I supposed to survive," asks a middle-aged woman, the voting ink on her finger still not faded. "Should I spend on my children's education or give them drinking water?"  Dhiraj Ahuja, who was with us, pointed out the innumerable tubewells in the area, dug by those who could afford it, now bone dry.
This is one part of Delhi's catastrophic water story. 
Cut now to a black-and-white picture taken in the 70s. It shows a group of five young men in a motor-boat on a vast lake. One of them, Sharad Gaur, is taking his friends to his ancestral village situated at the edge of the lake. His village and that vast lake is, today, Sector 20 Dwarka, a matrix of high-rise apartment buildings on the southern edge of Delhi. If the disappearance of a lake over 30 years is a common story in Delhi's growth as a city, there is enough evidence of water bodies disappearing almost overnight. Sharad Gaur, now the regional director with the Centre for Environment Education, a cell of the Environment Ministry, takes us across Delhi to show us how the city has rapidly destroyed its water bodies. The starting point is the most obvious -   the river Yamuna and its flood plains. 88% of Delhi's water supply comes from surface water of which 60% is from the Yamuna. The abuse and neglect of this river has been reported often, but each new visit reveals a wave of fresh damage that is frightening.  40% of the Yamuna flood plains have been destroyed, the construction continues unchecked. At one site, in the heart of the city, Sharad Gaur pointed out the last remaining bit of the flood plains that had survived. On it one could see the seasonal cultivation, traditional to flood plain, a soothing green body acting as sponge for water in a desperately thirsty city.  But less than a kilometer away, this was interrupted by a man dumping rubble into the same land - 'That's the way the Yamuna is reclaimed' explained Sharad Gaur.
If a city has no sense of its river, imagine the ease with which it has ruined its natural water bodies, old step wells, man-made lakes, each time evoking the fallacious argument of development. Shamsi Talab, once a water reservoir, is hemmed in by growing construction around it. Jahaaz Mahal as its name suggests once stood like a boat on water, now on dry ground. Vinod Jain's NGO TAPAS has been fighting a 20-year-old legal battle to save Delhi's innumerable natural water reservoirs. Their studies reveal that there's enough space for the city to grow without killing its own most precious natural resource. 'We have managed to bring 629 water bodies to the notice of the Court.  I think there are actually as many as 800-900 but most of these water bodies have construction on them, around them, there is constant encroachment and some have just gone dry. In 2003 the Court has given an order to preserve the water bodies and I'm grateful for that. There's a lot of work to be done and I just hope the Delhi government becomes more serious in abiding by the Court', says Vinod Jain.
Legal intent, though is not enough on this own. With depleted groundwater, a river under threat and natural water bodies being destroyed, it became clear that there would be an urgent need to do rainwater harvesting on a war footing. In June 2001, the Ministry of Urban Development made rainwater harvesting mandatory in all new buildings with a roof area of more than 100 square meters and in new plots that had an area of more than 1000 square metres. On the ground, this is not working as no one wants to take responsibility of implementing the law. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), responsible for construction bye-laws, rarely checks if new buildings have rainwater harvesting apparatus. The Ground Water Board told us to take our queries to the water-harvesting cell of the Jal Board. And at the Jal Board, its CEO, Debashree Mukherjee told us that they do have a department that facilitates water harvesting but the Jal Board is mandated to enforce the law. The buck is passed with dizzying speed.
Dhiraj Ahuja, the 'tubewell man' is keen we end our story on a positive note. He says his company no longer digs tubewells but now works on creating rainwater harvesting systems He uses the same old tubewell pipes to now take water from the roof deep into the ground. Ahuja's company has been hired by the Ministry of Environment to carry out a Canadian grant to install rainwater harvesting systems in some schools and institutions. Ahuja takes us to some of these sites and says with deep satisfaction that he is 'returning to the ground, what he took from it. 'I am glad' he says, 'to move from destruction to creation'. 
If only the city could move in the same direction.


Story first published:July 27, 2012 12:30 IST

Original Article: http://www.ndtv.com/article/view/india/248213?device=mobile