Water Supply

As of 6 August, the Mithi river in Mumbai became the first to have booms or 'thrash traps' installed across it. This machinery imported from Finland transfers garbage collected from the river, via a conveyor belt, to another conveyor belt that segregates the waste which is eventually recycled.  Booms are temporary floating barriers made up of light materials like plastic chained across water bodies to prevent and collect floating garbage from flowing into the sea.  Booms obstruct floating debris without affecting marine life in any way.  How will Mithi be cleaned up?  Booms placed near Bandra Kurla Complex on the…

“Our mindset is such that we want everything free,” says Umesh Desai director of water resources at Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, Ahmedabad. That mindset led to much initial resistance when resident associations in about 15 apartment complexes in Ahmedabad decided to install individual water meters and started charging for the water consumed by each apartment. Given that in most Indian cities, charges for utilities like water and electricity are heavily subsidised and nowhere near actual production costs, and free water and electricity is a sop most political parties offer during elections, it took some convincing the Ahmedabad flat owners…

The 2021-22 Union Budget announced the launch of the Jal Jeevan Mission (Urban), an ambitious project that aims to provide potable tap water supply to 2.86 crore households by 2024. How will this work out for urban India? Urban India is fast hurtling towards a major water crisis in the years to come. A 2020 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has projected that 30 Indian cities will face a ‘grave water risk’ by 2050 due to overcrowding in cities. A Niti Aayog report too had predicted that 21 Indian cities including New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad will run out of…

Apartment residents often are unaware of how much water they consume in their household. A common water meter installed by the BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board) measures consumption of the entire apartment complex, but not of individual flats. The monthly water bill based on this meter is usually split evenly among all residents. But, in May 2020, BWSSB introduced a new regulation that mandates internal water meters for every flat in apartment complexes. Each apartment is responsible for installing these meters within their premises. Individual water meters compulsory, but no penalty yet According to the new regulation 43-A…

On 18 July, Renita D’Souza and her family woke up with neck deep water in their house at Hanuman Nagar slum along the storm water drains. They found themselves surrounded by houses laced with dirt. “Our house was full of muck and we had to wade through a foot-deep grime throughout the day and there was no water to either drink or clean up," she said.  The electricity supply to their house was disconnected as a precautionary measure. The entire neighbourhood could not light gas stoves. “We had to ask our children to buy vada pav because we couldn’t even…

Over the years, we have noticed that giving people tips on water conservation often does not translate into practice, especially over the long term. A recent study by researchers at IIM-B shows that behavioural interventions could be a solution. The researchers, Vivek, Deepak Malghan and Kanchan Mukherjee, conducted the study at a 120-unit affluent apartment community in the outskirts of Bengaluru. Each flat in the complex had individual water meters installed already, so each household’s consumption could be measured. The researchers divided the households into four groups: The T1 group were given weekly reports on their per-person water usageT2 group…

With the severe water scarcity in Bengaluru, a large number of residents have to buy water, more so during summers. And due to indiscriminate digging of borewells in the rush to find water, the city's groundwater has been overexploited. But the efforts of many Bengalureans in rainwater harvesting (RWH) already show the way ahead for the city. Currently, Bengaluru is the Indian city with the second-highest number of RWH installations (1.55 lakh), next only to Chennai. Highlighting such efforts, and discussing how to amplify these, was the focus of a webinar jointly organised by BWSSB (Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage…

Vaikund Sundaram is an apartment community in Karapakkam on Old Mahabalipuram Road where I have been residing for the past six years. We are dependent on tankers for  water supply and we spend a lot during the summer to buy water every year. We wanted the water usage to be monitored better, share the costs based on the usage and avoid wastage of water. We have found a sustainable way to tackle this issue by the use of water meters. Water woes As the city expands its limits, demand for basic amenities like drinking water is increasing day by day.…

Monsoons are here and who doesn’t have happy memories of the fragrance of the first rain bringing along with it the much-needed relief from the weary heat of the Bengaluru summer. But then, along with memories, rains also bring inconveniences like localised flooding in urban areas and increased commute time!  In recent years, we see many Bengalureans struggling to access water during the summers. And one wonders where all the excess water from the rains disappeared.  Data shows that Bengaluru typically receives the highest rains in the months of August, September, and October. With August not too far away, now…

In many communities, the pandemic brought about a desperate need for a resource essential to survival: clean drinking water. Mumbai-based volunteers from the Ismaili Civic, a wider movement run by the Ismaili Muslim community globally, played a crucial role in the city by delivering water during the pandemic, earning praise both from doctors and the state government.  In early June 2020, they began distributing clean drinking water to COVID19 centres, first to larger hospitals and then to smaller ones (which had cropped up due to increasing cases), continuing through the deadly second wave, supplying close to 40,000 litres of water…