Why tempers are boiling over water in Shimla
The prestigious Shimla Summer Festival, which has been accorded the status of an international fete, was scheduled to kick off today (June 1). The event that was scheduled to go on till June 5, however, has been postponed — postponed indefinitely. The residents of this town in Himachal Pradesh have, meanwhile, asked tourists not head to the hill station this summer.
The reason — an acute and unprecedented water crisis that has forced the residents of the capital city of Himachal Pradesh to stand in serpentine queues and wait for water tankers to arrive.
Going by the admission of the Municipal Corporation of Shimla, which looks after civic issues across the state, in most localities water is being supplied once every five days while in other areas it is about once in 10 days. With water thus reaching people about only three-four times a month, Shimla is faced with one of its worst civic crises ever.
Coincidently, the crisis has hit Shimla at a time when the city sees its peak tourist season with as many as 20,000 people setting foot in the hill station every day on an average. With there being hardly enough water for the 2.2 lakh resident population, the situation has turned into a catastrophe.
The town got just 18 million litres of water per day (MLD) against the demand for 45 on June 30, two MLD less than what was received the previous day. Some neighbourhoods, especially those at the tail end of supply lines, haven't received a drop of water since the beginning of the problem this year, throwing day-to-day life out of gear.
Anger has been growing over the unprecedented water shortage with residents blocking highways, marching to chief minister Jai Ram Thakur's residence and some even threatening self-immolation, if nothing was done to address the problem.
The anger forces us to ask just what happened to Shimla's water and why has it suddenly gone missing.
The fundamental problem, chief secretary Vineet Chawdhry says, is a dramatic decline in the availability of water at the two main supply schemes that have long fed Shimla.
The Giri scheme, which has an installed capacity of 20 MLD, has been providing just 9.75 MLD. Shimla's oldest scheme at Gumma has been giving the corporation just about 10.6 MLD against its installed capacity of 21 MLD.
The civic body has attributed the crisis to adverse weather/climatic conditions, which it has said led to the drying up of water resources.
A prolonged dry spell with very little rainfall and very little snowfall may have precipitated the crisis, which had been in the making for quite some time.
Most pipes used for the water supply are old and leaky. A considerable amount of water, some say almost 50 per cent, is thus lost to leakages, which happen both at the pumping and distribution stages, even before reaching the people it is meant for. The civic body has done nothing to fix this. It has failed in its duty to have foreseen this crisis.
What can't also be ignored is the arbitrary way in which water is often distributed in the city which gives preference to VIP localities and hotels. Protests from people over water being allegedly supplied to the houses of judges and politicians on a preferential basis has compelled the Himachal Pradesh High Court to step in. While the civic body has denied the allegations, the anger among people continues to simmer.
Hotels in Shimla also stand accused of drawing excess water leaving people to battle the shortfall every year.
Another major problem is the contaminated water in Ashwini Khad. This source got contaminated in 2005 when a sewage treatment plant (STP) in Malyana was constructed just 5km upstream. This single source met the water requirement of about a quarter of the city's population, but then it was left to get polluted due to the STP with the administration choosing to look the other side. The administration only woke up to the problem when people started falling sick after consuming the contaminated water with some even dying. A couple of years back, the civic body stopped using the water from this source.
This is a classic example of how we treat out natural resources. Exploit them, pollute them and then abandon them.
With the impact of human enforced climate change now clearly visible in the form of dry winters and less rainfall, our apathetic attitude towards our natural resources is only set to make life more and more difficult.
Shimla is a trailer for what we are set to face across the country because the neglect shown by those in the hill station is hardly any different from what we are doing across the rest of the country.
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