Solan Municipal Corporation fails to address water scarcity

Solan is facing perennial water scarcity as the Municipal Corporation (MC) has failed to effectively address the problem. The Congress, which controls the civic body has failed to fulfil its election promise of providing water at subsided rates made in March 2020.

The Jal Shakti Department (JSD) supplies water while the civic body distributes it major parts of Solan city. In the merged areas, the department is handling the task of supplying water.

The BJP, which had earlier submitted a memorandum to the Governor through the Deputy Commissioner after a day’s protest over this issue, has now initiated a signature campaign. “We have received an overwhelming response of more than 5,000 people to our campaign,” says Shailender Gupta, municipal councillor and president of BJP’s Solan city unit.

Local residents rue that they are getting water supply after seven or eight days and the scarcity has become a perennial problem in Solan, exposing the mismanagement by the municipal authorities. “The city is witnessing the worst water crisis in years. I’ve spent at least Rs 10,000 on buying water through tankers this year,” rues Naresh, a resident of Chambaghat.

While MC officials claim that 40 per cent water is lost due to worn-out and leaking pipes, not much has been being done to address the shortage. The Municipal Commissioner was unavailable for his comments.

Superintending Engineer, Jal Shakti Department, Sanjeev Soni presented water supply data for the past week. He said that the department was providing adequate water as per the city’s daily requirement of 80 lakh litres and over the last week, an average of 74 lakh litres per day was supplied from the Giri and Ashwani Khad water schemes. “Since we are supplying water every day, the civic body should not encounter any issue in supplying water on alternate days, as per their earlier practice,” he added.

While 87.4 lakh litres of water was supplied today, 86 lakh litres of water was provided yesterday. The supply had dipped marginally on Thursday at 74 lakh litres while 64 lakh litres of water was supplied on Wednesday.

Soni said that the supply dipped to around 64 lakh litres whenever water was supplied in the peripheral areas of Solan like Kumarhatti and Dharampur, but that was an exception.

The situation warrants immediate measures like keeping a check on unaccounted water as complaints of water being supplied without authorisation to realtors and hoteliers pour in every now and then. Little has been done to plug such complaints by the civic body officials.

Even as the state Cabinet transferred the task of supplying water to the JSD in its August 1 meeting, its notification is awaited and its nitty-gritty is yet to be worked out. The JSD officials have, however, begin their groundwork in view of the potential challenges posed by erratic supply and worn-out paraphernalia.