Water crisis intensifies in parched Gurugram

Kulwinder Sandhu

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Gurugram, May 22

Gurugram, the cyber hub of North India, often referred to as the Millennium City, is facing water scarcity. With the summer peaking, the city’s two million residents, while demanding adequate water supply, are also pleading before the government to find out sustainable solutions to address the worsening water shortage in the ever-expanding city.

Prakash Lamba, a resident of Sector 21, said that his area is facing an acute shortage of water and almost every house in the Sector has to depend on water tanks. Nearly one-third of the houses in the sector have not received water for several days, he claimed, and added that the unavailability of water has made the life of the residents miserable.

Devender Singh, driver of a water tanker in Sector 57, said he was receiving 20 to 30 calls regularly from city residents demanding water. “But I’m unable to fill the tanker from borewells in time due to frequent power cuts,” he said. “Due to this, I’m unable to supply water in time to all callers.”

He said the going rate for a tanker of water is Rs 1,500, which includes the cost of filling roof-head water storage tanks in buildings.

Meanwhile, municipal corporation officials said the demand for water has crossed 650 million litres per day. Prem Singh, an assistant executive engineer of the MCG, who looks after the water supply wing of the civic body, said they are receiving about 500 MLD of water from the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA), which supplies water to the civic body. The GMDA runs two water treatment plants having a total capacity of 570 MLD, out of which supply is made to bulk users too — a few high-rise commercial and residential private buildings and big institutions/industries. The rest is provided to the MCG, which further supplies it to the residents through its pipelines with the help of boosting stations.

Besides this, the MCG also runs 600 borewells with the total capacity of 100 MLD, but even after supplying water purchased from the GMDA and the borewells, it falls short of the demand in peak summers.

GMDA officials revealed that the Chandu-Budhera Water Treatment Plant (WTP) has three units of 100 MLD capacity each. The fourth unit, which is likely to be set up in a few months, is expected to enhance its capacity to 400 MLD, providing much-needed relief to the city’s residents.

The WTP at Basai has a total capacity of 270 MLD. The power department is supplying uninterrupted power to the WTPs so that they could run continuously, without any power disruption, said an official.

How does GMDA supply water

The GMDA runs two water treatment plants having a total capacity of 570 MLD, out of which, it also directly supplies water to bulk users. The rest of water is given to the MCG, which further supplies it through its pipelines with the help of boosting stations to the local residents.

Plan to increase channel’s capacity

• The Irrigation and Water Resources Department of Haryana has planned to restructure the 69.585 km-long Gurugram Water Supply channel on Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) model to meet the growing demand of potable water in the metropolitan city.
• It will increase the capacity of this channel to bring more water from the Yamuna to the Basai water treatment plant. However, this project is likely to take 3 to 4 years for completion.