Water of life or death?

The Bombay high court’s strong disapproval of the BMC’s failure to provide clean drinking water has highlighted the dire state of the city’s water distribution system.

The city faces the threat of water contamination on several fronts. Chances of contamination are high across the city, as sewers and water pipes run closely in many areas, especially in South Mumbai, where the underground network is more than a century old. This increases the possibility of sewage seeping into water pipes through cracks during times of low or zero pressure once the day’s supply ends. Considering that the pipes are pressurised for only about four hours, which is the average period of daily water supply, sewage may seep in for the remaining 20 hours.

Mumbai gets 3,350 million litres of water daily and releases nearly the same in its gutters. It has a rough estimate of the water loss caused by leaks, but due its inability or unwillingness to measure the leaks, it has no idea of the volume of sewage that leaks out. How much of the two mixes is anyone’s guess!

The number of leaks that occur in the system also indicates its vulnerability. An RTI query had revealed that 1,031 complaints of leaks and bursts were attended to by the BMC in 2009 , resulting in a loss when the city was reeling under one of its worst water crises. The BMC loses 25% of its total daily water supply, through leaks and theft. But it has no mechanism to mitigate the contamination threat posed by such recurring instances.

In 2009, the BMC sanctioned a Rs480 crore project executed by private contractors to control water loss through leaks and pilferage and reduce contamination. A year and Rs346 crore later, water loss through leaks and pilferage remains at 25%. The project, along with precious public funds, has virtually gone down the drain. Like all other “ambitious” BMC projects, this too, has not had any audit whereby responsibility for negligence could be fixed on either BMC officials or the contractors.

The BMC also does not have a precise idea of where its underground pipeline network runs. So far there has been no serious effort to map underground utilities. The ambitious project to digitally plot the city, which proposes to mark each structure from a manhole to a building, does not include mapping of these utilities. Thus, the BMC will continue to grope in the dark to detect sources of contamination.

No wonder the annual report card brought out by the BMC’s health department suggests an alarming increase in water contamination. In 2009-10, the contamination rate jumped to 26.1% from 13.8% in 2008-09. Samples collected across the city were found to be unfit for human consumption. But the water department questions the reliability of such reports. It discards the findings, pointing out that the sampling is flawed as samples are not collected from municipal taps but from water that is already stored in underground sumps in buildings, and drums and buckets in the slums.

It took the tragic death of two pregnant women from jaundice allegedly caused by polluted BMC water for the high court to raise concern on the quality of supply. Is the BMC listening?

 Dhaval D Desai is a research fellow with Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. He may be reached at dhaval.desai@orfonline.org