Water cuts are on: 15% for you, 30% for hotels, malls

The inevitable has happened. Mumbai will have to live with steep water cuts until at least July 15 next year.

The BMC, which had held the bad news back until the assembly elections were completed, finally announced its post-monsoon water-cut plan on Wednesday.
To ensure that the limited freshwater contained in the city’s lakes lasts till the next monsoon has set in, the BMC has decided to impose a 15% cut in water supply for residential consumers until July 15 next year.

Concurrently, hotels, malls, showrooms, and other commercial establishments, identified as commercial bulk consumers by the municipal authorities, will be subjected to a 30% cut in supply.

This was decided at a meeting of the leaders of various political parties at the BMC, presided over by mayor Shubha Raul of the Shiv Sena. While the cuts are applicable immediately, officials from the corporation’s hydraulic department said supply to municipal taps will reduce gradually.

Normally, Mumbai gets 3,420 million litres a day (mld) of water from the BMC’s six reservoirs in Mumbai suburban and Thane districts. A 15% cut in supply, when fully effective, will mean that this supply is reduced by more than 500 mld.

Insufficient rains in the catchment areas of these reservoirs have meant that the lakes did not fill up to capacity. But for the steep year-long cuts, the water currently contained in the lakes (estimated at 9.4 lakh million litres) would not have lasted till the next monsoon. Officials of the hydraulic department said the present water supply is already 100 mld below normal.

A 15% cut in supply for residential consumers will also have an amplifying effect on the water supply hours. A senior official said that depending on the location of a household or a cooperative housing society, the supply time will reduce by up to 30%. This means that if a society currently gets water for three hours a day, it will now get water for just over two hours.

In fact, the civic administration was keen to impose a 30% cut in supply for residential colonies too. But the BMC’s political leadership, already mauled in the assembly elections, could not muster the courage to burden citizens that much.

Raul, instead, demanded that the BMC look at other options, like sinking borewells, recycling greywater, and plugging leaks in the short term, and desalination in the long term.

Senior civic officials were, however, sceptical about the efficacy of these short-term measures. The key question is: Has Mumbai done enough to survive the water crisis?