The drowning of a city

Of thirsty queues and 400 litre bathtubs

This is where the poor subsidise the water mania of the rich while the land dries up

DELHI is a city with two stark antipodes. Two-and-a-half, come to think of it. Guzzlers: that man in Golf Links, upto his neck and kneecaps in a 400-litre bathtub. Drymouths: a jam-packed, viciously frustrated queue to a tap dribbling erratically in a jhuggi-jhonpri colony in West Delhi. Half of one is half of the other: the outsized middle class, with a hope-giving lick of water an hour in the morning, an hour at night, from a city administration it sullenly views as capricious.

So when Haryana clipped water supply to Delhi by 227 mid (million litres a day) on January 10 this winter, Delhi's power-hyped officials shrilly accused it of aggravating the perennial water crisis. Meanwhile, an equal quantity of water leaked as usual that day out of badly maintained pipelines and faucets, sufficient water for two north Indian cities with populations of 1 million each.

Delhi demands, and gets, about 2,110 mld of surface water from the adjoining states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Despite the scarcity and there is one despite the deluge - 10 million Delhiites gorge more water than anywhere else in the country. The neighbouring cities of Meerut, Kanpur and Chandigarh, which endure similar environmental conditions, have a per capita water consumption half that of Delhi's 250 litres.

One of the city's benedictions is its "special status". The director (planning) of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), R G Gupta says, "Delhi needs its better standards. It is the capital and India's window to the world." But, unsatisfied still, the administration has set a consumption target of 320 Ipcd (litres per capita daily) by 1997, the end of the Eighth Five Year Plan. Ideally, the government says, it would like to inundate the city's 26 expected 13 million denizens in 360 Ipcd by 2001 - a consumption more voracious than most cities in the developed world today.

But Delhi and its adjoining areas are fast exhausting their water resources. Says S C Sharma, the director of the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), "Right now, groundwater in Delhi is optimally exploited and we wouldn't recommend any further extraction from its aquifers." As things stand, only 85 per cent of the city's inhabitants get their quota of water (beefed up with 275 mld from its aquifers).

The official attitude towards demand management is at best a studied inattentiveness that has allowed consumption to rocket even as the divide between supply and demand has widened. Since 1951, while the population has grown more than five times, the per capita consumption has also shot up about two-and-a-half times.

The water demand, which rose in the '50s, stabilised in the '60s, plateauing out at 170-180 Ipcd till the '80s, when the biggest leap took the consumption from 185 Ipcd to over 250 Ipcd. Playing with water Plus, real estate and a grasping consumer culture boomed in the '80s. The population grew by a whopping 3 million, fuelling headlong construction and a middle class affaire de coeur with gleaming, expensive, water-crazy sanitary and kitchen ware.

Since then, every pull of the flush has set the city back by 10-12 litres. According to V K Jain, vice-president of Hindustan Sanitaryware, a leading toiletry manufacturer, the smaller water savers of 5 litre capacity have low demaud. "We sell about 150,000 flushes a year, only 20,000 smaller ones," largely because - at between Rs 2,500 and Rs 4,000 - they cost double the traditional monsters.

The arrival of other consumer items like washing machines - one of the biggest successes in consumer durables in recent times - has only added to the pressure. Many manufacturers claim that they save water per unit of clothes; but machine efficiency and the increased frequency of washing negates any theoretical water con servancy, says housewife Chetana Singh of Indra Prastha Extension in East Delhi.

Water is also splurged cleaning the city's 1.9 million and madly burgeoning - two-, three- and four-wheelers. At the Indian Water Works Convention in February, S Prakash, chief engineer (water supply and distribution) of the Delhi Water Supply and Sewage Disposal Undertaking (DWSSDU) pointed out that car-washing had emerged as a major consumption area. Though a few big servicing centres reuse water, most medium and small utilities still depend on one-shot tubewells. A spokesperson of Noida Automobiles says that even with high-pressure nozzles, each car needs 50 litres.

The average Delhiite, however, pins the blame on the city's slum population, ignorant of the fact that the consumption of the city's 17 five-star hotels could bail out its 1.3 million slum-dwellers (see box Luxurious guzzling ... ). A single source supplies 40 slum households; and there is one potable water source for every 156 households.

Ironically, the berated slum-dwellers subsidise the rest of Delhi. Regularised jhuggi settlements blessed with individual domestic connections pay the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) a flat water rate of Rs 9.75 per month. A household of five people must consume about 130 Ipcd to recover its money. The actual consumption in most slum dwellings, however, is about 40-60 Ipcd. The rest pays for the city.

Delhi's brown, caked villages, spread over 70 per cent of.the National Capital Territory, get less than 100 mld - less than 5 per cent of the city's water consumption. Compared to the 9.72 mld sucked in by the 207 ha of the embassy tract, the villages get half a drop (see box Drunk on water).

UNDER the present dispensation, the three major water treatment plants at Hyderpur, Chandrawal and Wazirabad get 1410 mld from the Bhakra Nangal dam system and the Yamuna river.

The Bhakra water is carried from the Bhakra main link canal through the Narwana branch. The branch canal carries about 1,775 mld water into the western Yamuna canal at the Munak headworks, located 65 km west of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh. At Munak, 910 mld water is released through the 65 km-long Munak escape into the Yamuna to regenerate it and feed the 545 mld Wazirabad and the 410 mld Chandrawal treatment plants.

The Delhi parallel branch canal carries about 640 mld water from Munak to the Hyderpur water treatment plant. The unlined stretches of the canal, which is main tained poorly by both Haryana and Delhi, reduce the amount reaching the treatment plant to about 450 m1d, says the Central Water Commission (CWC).

The other major source of water to Delhi, the Upper Ganga canal in Uttar Pradesh, supplies about 450 mld water to the Bhagirathi treatment plant near Shahdara in East Delhi. A pipeline carries the water all the way from Murad Nagar, 26 km away. The necessary boosting hikes up the cost but the loss in transmission is thankfully negligible.

Haryana's bit- which chief minister Bhajan Lal instead was given on humanitarian grounds and was the express cause of the January spat - is 227 m1d, and comes from Haryana's quota of the Yamuna's waters. It is taken to the Hyderpur 11 treatment plant through the western Yamuna canal.

November 17, 1993, broke with the Haryana government tightening this supply to half, on grounds that the state needed the water to fulfill its rabi irrigation needs. Then came the bombshell that the remaining half would be stopped from mid-January onwards.

Political hoopla
Delhi griped and its chief minister, Madan Lal Khuraa of the Bhartiya Janata Party, asked Cogress leaders to intercede on behalf of the state of Delhi or face a retaliatory cut in water supply to the "VIP areas". Perhaps the best evidence of the political hoopla surrounding the issue was the alacrity with which the Union ministries of home and water resources jumped into the fray. Media reports, insofar as they could be trusted, said that even Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao was glued to the altercation.Ordinary folk had their minds on where the threatened abridgement would hit the hardest: "No one in Delhi wants to rent a house without a round-the-clock water supply," says R S Yadav of Mehta Properties, a real estate dealer in South Delhi. "At least for the toilets."

A storage tank is seen as woefully inadequate and more people in affluent as well as hard rock areas like South Delhi are frantically installing booster pumps, which are illegal when connected directly to the municipal mains (boosters that dip into underground storage tanks are allowed). The domino principle behind main- line boosters disrupts the logic of disciplining water supply, says S Prakash, engineer-in-chief of DWSSDU. Even if a single household pulls in water from surrounding lines, others have to add their own. It is no secret that new localities like Vasant Kunj "survive on boosters".

The city's groundwater is going fast. Most of Northwest and South Delhi is virtually impermeable hard rock. The alluvium in Najafgarh block in Northern Delhi has plentiful but brackish aquifers. That leaves New Delhi and East Delhi with potable and easily exploitable groundwater. Except for three tiny pockets east of the Yamuna, the situation fluctuates between disturbing and alarming (see map) as rich farmers and farm- house owners in the hard rock areas ignorantly over- exploit the aquifers that the hard crust prevents from recharging.

Reason enough for a carefully planned policy of groundwater exploitation. Instead, the capital has been stabbed through in the past two unregulated decades with borewells and tubewells -about 50 in the past year alone, many just desperate summer measures. There are no records of the actual number of private tubewells, admits S S Ahuja, engineering officer, MCD; but even the New Delhi Municipal Corporation owns 84 5-kilolitre behemoths (see box Drunk on water) -out of a total municipal count of over 720. Now who's going to police that?

DEAD drunk on its political clout, Delhi is blind to the fact that its water scarcity is directly proportional to its gargantuan wastage. At the peak of its "water crisis" in mid-January, Delhi's water consumption, at 215 Ipcd, remained 65 per cent higher than Bombay's.

Water supply planners -an oxymoronic term in Delhi's case - have no idea of the water lost in transit from the distant sources. But even conservative estimates put it as high as 900 mld in the dry months. The 220 km- long Narwana branch loses about 225 mld. The loss along the western Yamuna canal till it reaches the Hyderpur treatment plant is put at 190 m.1d. And by the time the water in the Yamuna near Baghpat reaches the Wazirabad treatment plant, it is down to 450 mld - an almost 50 per cent write-off.

And when the Yamuna enters Delhi, its water is almost raw junk. At the entry point at Wazirabad barrage, the water has a colliform count - an indicator of the concentration of pollutants - of 7,500 most probable number (mpn)/100 ml; downstream of Delhi, the colliform count shoots up to an incredible 9 million mpn/100 ml. Gloomier estimates put it at 24 million mpn/100 ml.

The culprit stalks the sewers, the gigantic volume of sewage that the city generates. According to the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) records, the 2,300 mld water used in the city generates sewage to the tune of 1,800-2,000 m1d. This is far more than the city's sewage disposal capacity, and the gap between generation and treatment has been growing. In 1956, Delhi generated 216 mld of sewage but could handle 75 per cent of it (see graph). By 1978, the city was ankle-deep in 730 mld of sewage, but the treatment capacity kept pace. However, the system virtually packed up in the burgeoning '80s. By 1985,.only half the 1,360 mld sewage could be treated.

Although official targets for the Eighth Five Year Plan, which has a substantial Rs 282 crore sewage treatment and disposal outlay, aim at augmenting treatment capacities to about 60-62 per cent, cost overruns haunt the projects.

Enhancement might not work anyway. A Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report warns that "the existing treatment plants do not run to the full designed capacity due to inadequate capacity in the sewerage system". And, even with 18 drains opening into the Yamuna, the expansion of the carrier sewage lines has always lagged behind enhancement and gunk generation.

T Venugopal, CPCB environmental engineer, revealed that a lack of routes has made it "increasingly common for domestic sewer mains to open into storm water drains which lead to the Yamuna". Even according to the conservative DPCC, an untold amount of toxins pour into 1he river riding the 1,200 million litres of untreated sewage.

A 1993 DPCC report also adds that only 31.8 mld of the 2,500 mld of waste water is treated sufficiently for river disposal. "This," says Venugopal, "is meaningless," because this handful of purity mixes with a overwhelming volume of untreated waste water and leaves no trace. The impact of about 20 per cent of waste water given "partial treatment", which entails the removal of insoluble solids, is indeterminate. The CPCB has classified Yamuna in the Delhi stretch as "fit only for irrigation, industrial use and waste water disposal". The latest desperate measure is the appropriately acronymed, Rs 357 crore YAP (Yamuna Action Plan). Unfortunately, only a small component involves Delhi. Of its 900 mld sewage treatment facility, a niggling 20 mld waste water will be from Delhi.

'Its own business'

As Virendra Vats, additional director in the Ganga Project Directorate (which administers YAP), puts it, the disposal of sewage in the national capital "is its own business". But Delhi's earnings from scavenging tax, all of Rs 3 crore, is a matter more for raillery than serious consideration. The operating costs top Rs 40 crore, which works out to Rs 16 for the disposal of 1 kI of sewage. The DWSSDU's accumulated debts tell the story better: at Rs 461.38 crore, they will probably have to be written off.

This virtual bankruptcy is the result of the uneconomical rates at which it provides water to Delhiites. Even frequent and generous over billing, says an MCD survey of selected areas, was of no particular help.

While the MCD estimates that the cost of water is about Rs 2 per kl, it charges as little as 45 paise per kl (upto 20 kl) from domestic consumers who account for as much as 82 per cent of the city's water demand. Commercial consumers are charged at the rate of Rs 3.90 per kl for the first 50 kI. They account for 32.1 per cent of the revenue while consuming 9.3 per cent of the water.

The third category, industrial consumers, are charged a much higher rate - Rs 6.50 per kI upto 50 kl. While they consume just 2.9 per cent of the total water, they contribute up to 21.5 per cent of the revenue.

This is not to say that the MCD doesn't hike its prices:. the last hike, illogically tiny, was just two years ago, but failed to make any impact on the chasm between demand and supply.

Take into account the burden of sewage disposal and the financial management of water in Delhi becomes even more illogical. The entire cost is borne by the state; while effluent load and cost of disposal are growing, nothing has been done to augment the resources of the civic administration. And officials will be the first to admit that the Yamuna has no choice but to continue to be the butt of a metropolis' garbage.