If that you think is grim, then here’s an even grimmer prognosis. The city will have to live with the water loss due to leakages. There seems to be no solution in sight.
Mumbai is facing one of its worst water crises and the primary reason for it is the massive leakages in the city’s water supply lines.
If that you think is grim, then here’s an even grimmer prognosis. The city will have to live with the water loss due to leakages. There seems to be no solution in sight.
According to senior engineers with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s hydraulic department, bring down the percentage of water loss due to leakages beyond a certain point will be financially unviable and technically challenging. The wastage, they said, can be brought down to 15% of the total water supply that currently stands at 22%.
Assuming that there is better monsoon in the city this year, which will restore the normal water supply of about 3,400 million litres daily (mld), then the city will lose close to 510 mld daily to leakages.
Thus, going by the current demand for water, the amount of water that will be wasted would be sufficient to provide proper water supply to all the eastern suburbs.
Even globally, the accepted norm for wastage of water through leakages in the water supply distribution system is just about 7%.
Engineers, however, insist that the cost involved in detecting, repairing the leakage and then maintaining the restored condition is huge.
They said that many of the leakages ran underground and beneath concretised surfaces, which makes repairing them even a technical challenge.
According to the presentation made by Singapore’s national water agency — Public Utilities Board (PUB) — on Sunday, Singapore has been successful in bringing leakages down to 4.4% of their total water supply.
The belief that all leakages in the city cannot be tapped and repaired will also pose a question mark on the efficacy of a plan to conduct a comprehensive water audit for the city.
Former hydraulic chief TV Shah — widely considered as an expert in the field of water engineering — has already asserted that given the city’s topography and land-use, it will be difficult to carry out an accurate city-wide water audit.
RTI exposes delays in arresting leakages: A Right to Information (RTI) query has exposed the BMC’s failure in arresting leakages.
The RTI query filed by Yuva, a citizen’s activist group, had sought information of leakages detected in various wards between April 2008 and March 2009. Apart from revealing that an average 80 leakages occurred in a ward every month, the reply also brought to light a serious loophole.
Despite the authorities knowing about it, many leakages are not being plugged in time. For instance, between May and August last year, several detected leakages in the Colaba municipal ward went unattended. The case was pretty much the same in other parts of the city as well.
Civic officials passed the blame on procedural delays and resource crunch. “Procuring permission from the traffic and roads department to undertake work on busy stretches is often tedious,” an official said.
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