Delhi may face a water shortage due to a 20 percent deficit in raw water supply from Haryana due to a fault in the main carrier, which will take 48 to 72 hours to repair. Water minister Saurabh Bharadwaj on Wednesday said while the Delhi Jal Board was trying to rationalise water, it will still lead to inconvenience for a large population in the national capital as it is peak summer.
Bharadwaj said water shortage might affect 30 lakh people in Delhi. He said early in the morning the carrier lined channel (CLC), which carries raw water to the treatment plant of the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), broke between Khubru and Kakroi regulator near Sonipat.
According to Bharadwaj, the CLC is a major line for raw water to Delhi from Haryana. The CLC and Delhi sub-branch (DSB) supply raw water to treatment plants at Bawana, Dwarka, Nangloi, Haiderpur, Wazirabad, Chandrawal and Okhla, he added.
The minister said the matter was being pursued on a war footing with the Haryana government and their irrigation department, so as to restore the CLC. At present, there was a deficit of around 20 percent in raw water supply from Haryana to Delhi. He added that the Haryana irrigation department informed that it will take 48 to 72 hours to repair the CLC.
Delhi is already grappling with a water shortage in many areas as the DJB is only able to supply 1,000 million gallons a day (MGD) of water to the city’s two crore residents. The population needs 1,300 MGD of water for drinking and daily needs, as per official estimates.
Earlier in the day, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said Delhi’s ongoing water crisis will be resolved in two to three years. The government, he said, had taken steps to enhance the water supply capacity by up to 300 MGD.
Kejriwal said the DJB’s water supply capacity had increased from 850 MGD in 2015 to 1,000 MGD now, and that he had set an ambitious target to further enhance it to a range of 1,200 to 1,300 MGD in two to three years.
(With PTI inputs)
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