Click to play videoNew Delhi: Vasant Vihar is one of the posh colonies of Delhi. There are no creature comforts its residents cannot afford. Ironically its the most basic of poll promises - bijli, sadak and paani (electricity, roads and water) that strikes a chord with this affluent lot.
President Vasant Vihar RWA, Kailash Vasudev says, "One lieutenant governor, two ex-lieutenant governors are live here and they too need to call in tankers for water. There's no water here. Today, 14 colonies are served by a single reservior meant for three colonies, with no augmentation present."
Shashi Nag is a resident of F Block in Vasant Vihar. Her water needs are fulfilled not by treated water from the municipal reservior, but from a government-owned borewell - a borewell that was originally installed to meet the colonies gardening needs.
"Any other thing we can always buy, generator or invertors for electricty, but water is a basic necessity whose lack is troubling. We don't get any water from the Jal Board reservoirs. They dug a tuebwell four years ago but it's hard water. Then for 20 days, the tubewell stopped funtioning. There was no water, just tankers," says she.
Maps of Delhi over the decades bears testament to the fact that the city is bursting at its seams, and the best laid civic plans have not kept pace.
In the last five years, the government has managed to help water-short areas with the Sonia Vihar treatment plant. Rainwater harvesting has also been extensively promoted. Despite this, there is scarcity in a lot of areas.
Resident of CR Park in south Delhi, Manjori Ghosh says, "In most parts of CR Park, there's acute water scarcity. Many people call tankers to their places. Some people need tankers daily."
Adds a resident of Tughlakabad Extension in south Delhi, Abdul Rahim, "We bored through when we bought the house, but it failed. Water levels went down and now the water is very hard. We give money and buy water. The Delhi Jal Board water comes every third day and sometimes not."
For more than eight months in a year, private and government tankers are the only solution for large pockets of south and southwest Delhi. But its election time and the government wants to keep urban voters happy, so three months ago, the Central gound water board issued guidelines allowing people to dig tuebwells by just intimating the local deputy commisioner 10 days in advance. Already heavy machinery has sprung up all acorss the city to draw out ground water - eight of them in Vasant Vihar alone.
A member of FORCE, Jyoti Sharma says, "It's like a free for all with allowing anybody to construct a tubewell. It's disastrous."
Today, Delhi draws 250 times more water than what goes in. More than 40 per cent of the city's water is being lost in theft and leakages alone. The national Capital today could well be on a brink of a severe water crisis, with politicians depending on little but the wavering good will of neighbouring states to help it tide through.
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