New Delhi (dpa) – Each morning the household of 50-year-old shopkeeper Rajinder Singh in New Delhi's Najafgarh district begins a patient wait for water to trickle out of the tap. As soon as the first drop hits the bucket, the family begins its daily scramble to bathe, wash clothes and store water in a tank. But sometimes the wait for the water supply that lasts half an hour, stretches well into the next day. “We lose a major part of our day and, our lives, in a frustrating wait, wondering whether we'll get adequate supplies,” Singh's wife Bimla says. “Sometimes we manage with a few buckets of water. Other days, we have no option but to buy water from private suppliers.” The water crisis in the semi-rural Najafgarh on the capital's fringe is not much different in other parts of the city. Or in other cities like Chennai in the south, where crowds waiting to fill water from public taps or water-tankers are so large that fights often break out among people. With the long and sweltering summer ahead, Delhi's residents and authorities are bracing for a testing time: the rising mercury and empty taps often leave frayed nerves. Clashes and angry protests over water are commonplace. Across the city in Alipur, a dispute led to a murder within a family when a woman locked a handpump to prevent others from drawing water. Even when there is water, it is often contaminated. In some areas, samples of drinking water have shown pesticides and heavy metals as hundreds of city districts do not have proper sewer systems. “We die a slow death by drinking such poisonous water, but do we have any option? We have to survive,” Najafgarh resident BS Yadav said. “Some well-to-do people install reverse-osmosis water filters but the poor have to suffer. There are many cases of water-borne diseases like jaundice, and cholera, skin diseases and premature greying of hair and balding.” With rapid urbanization and growing populations, Indian cities, already ranked among the worst in Asia in terms of hours of water availability per day, face daunting water and environmental crises. The latest findings of the Census 2011 show that 20 per cent of Indian households send a person more than half-a-kilometer to collect drinking water, and that figure is growing in rural areas. Country planners say the water stress is bound to get worse but there are no easy answers. According to government data, the nation's water demand has grown to 830 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water per year but supplies remain stagnant at 1,123 BCM. Demand will soon outstrip supply as the latter starts dropping below 1,000 BCM in the next couple of years, while the demand will rise, to touch 1,447 BCM by 2050. Water scarcity is among the main reasons behind the suicide of 16,000 farmers annually as crops fail in water-deficient areas, experts say. A study by the Center of Science and Environment shows that most of the 71 cities including New Delhi and Mumbai do not have water management plans and lose more than one-third of their supply due to leakage in substandard piping. Upmarket areas in Delhi also witness massive wastage of water. A businessman who lives in the south Delhi area of Greater Kailash complains that his neighbors use more than 3,000 liters per day on washing cars and watering lawns. “They use booster-pumps to suck out as much water from the public water mains. But even that is not enough, they call a private water tanker every other day.” Water Resources Minister Vincent Pala said a national program of conservation, minimizing wastage and ensuring fair distribution has been launched to ease the “water stress.” Tensions over water are also rising with India's neighbors like Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. Rebon Dhar of the Foundation for Non-Violent Alternatives said regional governments should urgently cooperate in the governance of water resources. “The driest continent in the world is Asia, where availability of fresh water is not even half the global annual average of 6,389 cubic meters per inhabitant. It is clear that the water situation will only exacerbate, leading to serious implications for economic growth and inter-riparian relations,” she said. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/21y7h Tags: Crisis, featured, India, Water Section: Editor's choice, Environment, Features, Going Green, Latest News, South Asia
