Bhopal Notes :: 69 : Criminal waste of water

http://www.bagchiblog.blogspot.com

The local municipality is an organization with a very thick elephantine hide. Any amount of criticism of its performance, or rather lack of it, just slides off its back and crates a huge muddy pools below it in which it likes to wallow. If one looks at the vernaculat press, the papers are full of stories of its acts of omissions and failures but seldom does it react. The leading vernacular daily, Dainik Bhaskar, brings out every week a special supplement called CITY PLUS. It tells more about the Municipal Corporation’s omissions while carrying out or rendering services than its acts of commissions. It is felt that if the Corporation authorities took up for correcting all that is reported in it every week it would be of tremendous help and perhaps it would bring smiles back on the faces of Bhopal’s citizenry.

Take for instance the matter relating to supply of water to the citizens. It is one of the more important services that the municipality is supposed to render. Monitoring its availability, conserving whatever is received in its reservoirs and then effectively supplying it equitably to all is perhaps a very vital duty. If it does not build roads, if it does not run schools or if does not beautify the shores of the inherited Upper Lake they will not create as much furor as will be raised by non-supply or inadequate supply of water. Water is life and none could survive without it – not even the Commissioner Municipal Corporation and his lackeys, who are sitting on top of multiple sources of water in the city and scores of miles of pipelines that are meant for its supply to the people. And yet it is here that the Corporation shows its ugly face by not simply being lackadaisical but by also being criminally negligent in carrying out its functions.

The newspapers have been reporting persistent leakages of precious water from the pipelines with an unmitigated frequency. Almost every other day there would be report of loss of millions of gallons of water due to leaks in the Munici[al Corporation’s supply lines. Only three days back there was a report that said a pipeline from Kolar reservoir was leaking causing loss of 30 lakh litres of water every day. Kolar Dam is one of the major reservoirs on which the people of the city depend for their water needs.

 Such leaks, frequent as they are, are criminal in nature if allowed to continue for long in these water-scarce days. Every week there is a report of how difficult the oncoming summer is going to be in respect of availability of water. There has been rainfall that was scantier than other years and the city’s Upper Lake, the main reservoir from which the water needs of the citizens are met, is drying up fast. Its level at the end of the monsoon season was 8 feet below the full tank level and it has plummeted further on being continuously tapped for supplies during the last four months.What the reports are emphasizing is that the city is going to have a water crisis in its hands next summer and the leakages are going to make it worse. But, the reports do not seem to catch the eyes of those who are responsible for the city’s water supply. The Municipal Corporation seems to be too busy elsewhere or is unconcerned about its responsibilities.

The only remedy they can think of for the problem is to cut the water supplies to various parts of the city regardless of its consequences on various sections of the citizenry. The periodicity of supplies is another matter which needs the attention of the authorities concerned. It is observed while there are areas where the supply is cut down to the bare minimum there are areas where water is available aplenty right through the summer months. Here the prevailing VIP culture comes into play. The area where there is concentration of ministers and bureaucrats get water every day reportedly for longer hours whereas for lesser mortals it is supplied once in two, in some areas even once in three days. That the municipality is supposed to supply equitably to all citizens is a matter that is cleanly overlooked. It is inequity that prevails.

Also overlooked is the fact that there is an undocumented social contract between the Corporation and the people according to which the former is required to meet the civic needs of the people adequately and equitably. It is time that the Corporation is reminded of this contract so that the people are saved from sufferings and privation for want of their legitimate civic needs. They should not need to go before them as supplicants to beg for what is legally theirs and force the Corporation to carry out its functions more carefully so that the natural resource of water that is progressively getting scarcer is effectively conserved for the benefit of the people.

*Photo from internet