Planning a summer holiday as a tourist at the hill queen station here? If nothing else, make sure that you have adequate water to drink and wash.
Water is being rationed and locals have a tough time; they have to wait in long queues to collect just a bucketful of water
SHIMLA: Planning a summer holiday as a tourist at the hill queen station here? If nothing else, make sure that you have adequate water to drink and wash to enjoy your stay in and around Shimla, for the summer capital is not having best of times as far as drinking water supply is concerned.
The locals start queueing up with buckets and pitchers the moment they come to now that a municipal water tanker would be around on a particular day. And it is a long wait for the turn to come to have a bucketful of water at the end of the day.
With the summer season peaking in Shimla, the civic authorities have decided to ration the water supply with taps receiving water once or twice a week, that too for few hours only.
The popular hill station with a 250,000 population needs eight million gallons of water daily, which has become an impossible task for the authorities to meet.
Most of the 450 hotels, restaurants and guesthouses meet their needs by procuring water in tankers from faraway streams as the local reservoirs have only limited supply for residential areas.
According to the municipal authorities, only three out of six water drawing pumps installed at the nearby Gummah were operational. The situation was no better at the Ashwini khud pumping station where three out of five pumps were functional. As a result the daily supply to the city hovers around 55 lakh gallons of water.
This has resulted in steep fall in the water reservoirs at the Ridge and at the Sanjauli town. If the water level in the reservoir on the Ridge was barely 7 ft , the one at Sanjauli recorded meagre 9 ft which has sent alarm signals all around the capital. Normally the reservoirs should have 15 ft to 20 ft level of water stored in them.
Mohan Chauhan, Municipal Commissioner, however, seeks to water down the gravity of the problem saying that “ the situation was not too bad though the municipal corporation was facing problem in supplying water to tail-end localities because of low pressure.” He expected the supply to improve over the next couple of days.
According to an estimate, 1.5 million gallons of water of the daily supply is lost invariably lost due to leakage as a majority of the supply pipes were laid decades ago.
The crisis is likely to worsen in the coming weeks as the dry spell grows along with the tourist rush.
The maximum temperature in Shimla touched as high as 25°C last week indicating that the spell of summer this time is going to be unsparing. According to the local meteorological office the summer this year could be quite severe due to various factors like global warming.
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