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Water shortage puts New Delhi at mercy of tanker mafia

NEW DELHI — Every summer, when Ms Minoo Phakey’s water runs out, she does what most people do in her middle-class neighbourhood: She calls the mafia.

NEW DELHI — Every summer, when Ms Minoo Phakey’s water runs out, she does what most people do in her middle-class neighbourhood: She calls the mafia.

Within an hour, a man in a tanker arrives, carrying a load of dubious water drawn illegally from the city’s groundwater. With India’s capital gripped by its annual hot season water shortage, the city’s so-called tanker mafia is doing a roaring trade.

An estimated 2,000 illegal tankers ply New Delhi’s roads every day, providing lifelines to millions whose taps have run dry and bearing symptoms of a much bigger problem — the city’s desperately dysfunctional water system. The tankers do not come cheap. But some Delhi-ites have no choice.

“You need water, you will pay anything, right?” said Ms Phakey, a marketing executive. She is hardly alone.

In a city known for its vertiginous inequalities, the shortage affects people from both upscale gated communities and dust-blown slums, as every day, the city’s supply falls more than 160 million gallons short.

Most residents have piped water for only a couple of hours a day and almost a quarter have none at all. With a leaky water infrastructure long overwhelmed by new arrivals, New Delhi is grappling with a dizzying social and environmental challenge, worsened by chaotic management.

For many, it is a distressing reminder of a daily reality that lags behind India’s superpower dreams.

While New Delhi has had water troubles for decades, the shortage has become critical in recent years as the city’s population has grown with little or no planning, rising from nine million in 1991 to almost 17 million today.

Even many of the wealthiest neighbourhoods get water for only an hour in the morning, with residents rushing to turn on pumps and fill storage tanks when the municipal supply flows.

The most urgent problem, though, is getting water to the sprawling neighbourhoods of illegally constructed buildings, home to 40 per cent of the city’s residents and largely without water lines. The city’s water agency, the Delhi Jal Board, sends 900 tankers onto the crowded roads every day. In some neighbourhoods, a tanker passes every few minutes, with its load sloshing down its sides.

But it is nowhere near enough. Tankers usually stop for only 15 minutes, while dozens of people crowd around waving buckets and plastic tubes. Tempers flare in the fierce heat and fights are frequent. In some areas, people get only three litres. New Delhi’s water authority downplays the problem. “I wouldn’t call it a crisis,” said Mr Vijay Kumar, the agency’s chief. “If you look at Delhi overall, certain pockets are water-scarce — not all.”

Those pockets are home to about 3.5 million people. The agency says it does not have enough water and largely blames neighbouring states, which it says failed to deliver extra water to the city after a 2012 canal renovation.

“That is our biggest constraint,” said Mr Kumar. “Once we are in position to commission the entire infrastructure, water will be more equitably distributed, more rationally managed. But what is crucial is that we should get more water.” Still, critics say the city — which is close to two major rivers and has a significant water table — should not be running short. In theory, as the World Bank noted, New Delhi should have more water available per capita than Paris.

“Delhi is a very privileged city in terms of water availability. So Delhi seems to be a case of crisis of mismanagement,” said Mr Himanshu Thakkar, who runs the New Delhi-based South Asian Network for Dams, Rivers and People, a research and environmentalist organisation. AP

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