Have you ever wondered as to why Mumbai, an island city faces water shortages? Why every year April onwards Mumbaikars face water cuts and we have the dams overflowing during the monsoon? If the city has enough water with more than adequate rainfall, why do we have to resort to ratio water supply? With these questions in mind, I decided to seek answers from the authorities.
I filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act with the State Urban Development (UDD) department. And their reply was astonishing as the department did not have any information on this. It is the responsibility of the UDD to oversee all the cities across the state and is supposed to keep a tab on rapid urbanisation. And drinking water supply is the most important aspect of the urban planning.
Small mercy that the UDD referred my RTI application to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). Mind you, MCGM is the richest civic body in Asia and Mumbai is the economic capital of India. But, the corporation’s replies to my queries from different water departments werereal eye-openers.
The officer from MCGM’s Ghatkopar Water Works responded saying that the Main Trunk overseas supply from Vihar and Tulsi lakes and there has been no desilting work undertaken at these water bodies.
There is, therefore no question of any money spent on this work, the response was signed by Assistant Engineer and Information Officer Peter Rodrigues.
The following response from the MGCM’s Hydraulic Engineering department at Kapurwadi, Thane said, “As per this office record, no desilting work (was) done in the lakes/reservoirs of Modaksagar, Tansa and Middle Vaitarna in the last ten years.” However, no word from the MCGM on desilting of the remaining two lakes - Bhatsa and Upper Vaitarana.
The seven lakes and reservoirs together supply a total of 3.8 billion litres of drinking water to Mumbai city daily against the estimated demand of 4.4 billion litres. It is no rocket science that desilting is needed to maintain the water holding capacity of lakes and reservoirs. In fact, MCGM this year allocated about Rs 250 crores for desilting of the city drains as part of the monsoon preparedness.
The piling up of the silt in the bottom of the lakes and reservoirs obviously leads to misleading data and even complacency that everything is hunky-dory on the waterfront, whereas the people are forced to go for water tanker supply.
This also leads to the multi-crore water tanker mafia racket ruling the city and suburbs with the operators charging as they wish. A valid question that arises is that from where do the tanker suppliers get their water from if the MCGM runs out of water?
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has noted that several metro cities such as Mumbai and Chennai have witnessed unprecedented flooding in recent years. Inadequacies of flood protection works, reduction in the water holding capacity of natural reservoirs in the basin due to progressive siltation, breaching of riverbanks, raising of riverbed caused by deposition of silt are among the reasons, the CPCB noted in its ‘Indicative Guidelines for Restoration of Water Bodies’ published five years ago.
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We at NatConnect Foundation have, therefore, requested the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to appoint an expert committee – and not of politicians – to go into the technicalities, the process of desilting, disposal and management of the silt taken from the reservoirs.
There have been research reports that the lake-bottom silt is full of nutrition and it is quite useful for our farm lands which are losing top soil. Hence, this suggestion for action, as they say in legislative language!
(The author is a media veteran, an environmentalist and Director at NatConnect Foundation)
