Clean drinking water at a low price in Chennai

Chennai: If you are in Chennai chances are soon you may be drinking desalinated sea water. The city has got the largest desalination plant in the country which supplies drinking water at an incredibly cheap price.

Touted to be south Asia's largest sea water desalination plant, it will supply hundred million litres of drinking water every day to Chennaiites. A private company has spent Rs 600 crore for the project and the purified water will cost less than five paise per litre.

This idea came up in the year 2003 when Chennai faced its worst ever drinking water scarcity. With two more such plants in the pipeline, officials say the city may never face that kind of a crisis.

"Even if reservoirs go dry, we will now be able to maintain a steady supply of drinking water," said Shiv Das Meena, MD, Chennai Metro Water.

Chennai requires six hundred million litres of drinking water every day. With the city's population nearing ten million, the government can't be complacent but will have to expedite the pipeline project from Cauvery to quench Chennai's thirst.

August 01, 2010 08:29 IST

5 Water Board officials arrested

HYDERABAD: Fourteen months after the outbreak of cholera that claimed 13 lives in Bholakpur, city police on Thursday arrested five officials of the Hyderabad Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB), including its Chief General Manager.

Penalties

The officials were charged with law sections which deal with negligence leading to death and acts that could spread infectious diseases. Punishments, if convicted, could stretch up to two years in jail along with penalties. They were released later on bail.

The arrested included Board's CGM Manohar Babu, GM Praveen Kumar, DGM Rajasekhar Reddy, area in-charge David Raju and field assistant Uma Maheshwara Rao.

Outbreak

The outbreak of cholera in May 2009 led to a furore as police investigations revealed that the officials had not initiated any remedial measures despite repeated complaints lodged about supply of contaminated water.

As the cholera deaths mounted, police registered cases, but for mysterious reasons no arrests were made.

Accountability

The outbreak that led to hospitalisation of hundreds of residents of Bholakpur and surrounding areas had not only marred the image of the most happening city, but also brought into sharp focus the lack of accountability in the civic departments.

Investigations established an unfailing regularity in not redressing the complaints of contaminated water being supplied through lines which criss-crossed with sewer lines.

The presence of the units processing raw hides and animal bones further complicated the situation as the waste, a perfect host for bacteria-causing cholera, mixed with the drinking water.

Controversy

The outbreak of epidemic grew into a political controversy as different parties launched agitations.

Negligent act

The arrested officials are charged under Sections 304-A (rash and negligent act resulting in death), 166 (public servant disobeying law with intent to cause injury) and 270 (malignant act likely to spread infectious diseases dangerous to life) of Indian Penal Code.

Friday, Jul 30, 2010

'Govt overestimated water availability'

If this is true, it could change the entire economic direction of the country. A paper published by researchers from IIT-Delhi and Jamia Milia Islamia has claimed that the government has overestimated the utilisable water resources of the country by up to 88% and India had breached its water security levels way back in 1997-98 by overexploiting the resource.

Published in 'Current Science', India's leading science journal, the study by N K Garg of IIT-Delhi and Q Hassan of Jamia Milia Islamia claimed that the government overestimated water available for use by a whopping 66-88% by double accounting for the resource in their methodology.

The findings could be a wake up call for planners and have a huge impact on India's estimate of water resources, possibly leading to a recast of plans for regulation and development of power and irrigation schemes. The authors claimed, on the basis of four years of work, that India had only 668 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water compared to 1,110 BCM claimed by the Central Water Commission — less by 442 BCM. This is alarming considering that even the projected demand (and this is the lower side of projections) of 987 BCM cannot be met even after all the available water is exploited.

In water jargon, development of water resource refers to creating the structures to use different water resources — surface water or ground water. The entire water available in a country, in its rivers and under the ground, obviously cannot be used. The portion that hydrologists conclude can actually be extracted and put to use is referred to as "utilisable water resource". Over exploitation in any year implies extracting more water than is naturally recharged in the river basin in that year. "What the government has done is double accounting of one vital element of the water cycle and therefore ended up with an inflated figure. While the error looks simple, with the ground water data of the country being classified, it took us four years of digging and understanding the method of calculation to figure out this discrepancy," Garg, from the department of civil engineering, IIT-Delhi, told TOI.

Cutting through the reams of data and calculations mentioned in the paper, Garg explained, "During the lean period, the water in rivers that one sees is actually ground water as there is no rain at the time. But when the CWC calculated total utilisable water, it accounted for the water in the rivers at the time as surface water as well as ground water, leading to the inflated figures." It sounds so much a clerical mistake but A K Gosain, also from the civil engineering department of IIT-Delhi and on the PM's expert committee on climate change, said, "The trouble is all the data on ground water is classified and never released to even scientists. Nobody outside the government has been able to evaluate the statistics. Even when we were doing simulation studies to look at impact of climate change on our rivers, we had to use American data on Indian rivers to validate our results."

Source: TOI , 27 oct 2007