Jaipur/Delhi: Be it Jaipur or Delhi, all water ATMs draw water from ground. The only exception is the national capital’s prime area, which falls under the jurisdiction of the New Delhi Municipal Council.
According to Central Ground Water Board’s (CGWB’s) ‘Ground Water Year Book 2014-15 for Rajasthan State’:
“There is progressive increase in groundwater draft due to increasing population, urbanisation and industrialisation.
In as many as 172 blocks, the draft has exceeded the estimated replenishable resource. In 24 blocks, the stage of development has reached critical levels and 20 blocks in semi-critical levels.
Any further increase in the draft will aggravate the already worsened situation of declining water levels and/or degrading water quality in some areas.”
Public Health Engineering department officials said that neither have they sanctioned any such arrangement, nor has anyone asked them for permission for it. “It is for the municipal corporation to decide on such permissions,” Devraj Solanki, the PHE department’s additional chief executive (Jaipur Region II), said.
Ashok Lahoty, the then Mayor and now an MLA, said there is no policy decision as such except that water would be offered free of cost to the poor.
Jaipur already gets water from the Bisalpur Dam nearby and another one is in the pipeline at Isarda, for drinking water for the urban population. This is why there are no major water quality issues that have been reported yet.
Then why has the need for private players arisen? “Well, the company offered to provide alkaline water, which is good for health. Plus, it was being for offered free. All we needed was to provide them land for the kiosk,” Lahoty said.
Experts have suggested incentivising operators for resource augmentation and punitive actions against those who merely tap groundwater without recharge. Farhad Contractor, who has been working with communities in the water conservation sector in Rajasthan for more than two decades, suggested that the policy makers, water ATM proponents and the private company operators all need to now think long term. The operators, he said, should also think of harvesting rainwater for each of the water ATM machines involved.
Also read: In Jaipur, Water ATMs Replace Traditional Earthen Pots – But at What Cost?
He added: “It may not be possible for individual units but harvesting rainwater for a small region is always possible. It needs to be studied based on an average daily consumption of that machine today and keeping in mind future requirement. Or else, how far can such a process of drawing water go on when we already have 87% exploitative withdrawal as India’s average?”
Delhi
In Delhi, the NDMC, the urban body that looks after the VIP areas of the national capital, has allotted space for 37 water ATMs to two companies as it found that taps and free stand posts were often vandalised.
Under the NDMC’s arrangement, the companies get treated water as input for water ATMs or kiosks. They also use filters or reverse osmosis to ensure purer water before output. Additionally, there is a need to provide cool water in the summer months too.
“We charge them Re 1 for 300 ml water. The companies put in maintenance cost and earn revenues. Installation cost too is borne by them,” Harsh Meena, executive engineer (water supply) with the NDMC, explained. “It was a policy decision, very much cleared by the Council.”
The NDMC area kiosks are not using groundwater, he claimed.
According to the CGWB records, South-East Delhi and South-West Delhi are the very areas that have seen “dark zones.” So why is the Delhi Jal Board encouraging water ATM plants to use borewells? Is there no policy as to what water should be used as input by these water ATMs?
“No, there is no policy – neither for the sourcing of water as input for these reverse osmosis plants, nor for their location,” confirmed a DJB official, who is not authorised to speak with the media.
Also read: Delhi’s Many Water ATMs Serve Thousands – But Not Who Need it Most
But attempts to get DJB on record – DJB is the nodal agency for anything related to water in Delhi – proved futile. Repeated phone calls, mails and even requests for personal visits to the office of Shalabh Kumar, member (water) of the DJB and Ankit Srivastava, an Aam Aadmi Party representative working on water issues at the DJB, went unanswered.
Questions about sustainability
It all boils down to three things – access, availability and quality.
How far do the needy need to travel to reach the taps, kiosks, ATMs or water tankers? At a given facility, is water really available? And finally, if both hurdles are cleared, what is the quality of this water?
The water ATMs are helpful at places where they are in good working condition, especially in public areas such as markets, where people from all backgrounds have long since stopped trusting open municipal taps. In case of residential areas, while Jaipur caters to an underprivileged population, Delhi shows that such water ATMs/kiosks are not inclusive enough.
Experts warn that the whole ATM effort can be a futile exercise if done without a proper demand survey and also without a scientific management plan. “Private companies will seek to maximise profits. So their choice of location will be driven by that factor. The government needs to offer subsidies to private players to reach out to the underprivileged population,” Shashank Shekhar, environmentalist and HoD at Delhi University’s Department of Geology, said.
“The government should facilitate the equity in access and equity in utilisation of natural resources,” he suggested. Financial load can be shared through Corporate Social Responsibility as well, he added.
The water ATM operators claim the common person is already a beneficiary as she pays substantially less for this water, compared to the branded bottled water in the markets. Plus, it reduces a lot of plastic from the environment. Keeping in view these two aspects, experts have suggested offering more incentive to these companies than bottled water companies, but more regulations should be in place too.
As is evident, the authorities in both Jaipur and Delhi are not concerned about the source of raw water that goes into the ATMs. But what is surprising is that neither the state governments nor the Centre has any policy or guidelines for identifying locations that will ensure inclusivity and sustainability vis-à-vis groundwater usage in already troubled areas.
Washing his hands off the issue, Kunal Kumar, Mission Director (Smart Cities) under the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) said the Centre will not direct states on such matters as groundwater is a state subject.
“The states should follow the legal landscape for deciding where to allow such ATMs or kiosks,” he said. “We (Centre and respective states) work in a federal structure and the Centre cannot lay guidelines for every single thing.”
Nivedita Khandekar is an independent journalist based in Delhi. She writes on environmental and developmental issues. She can be reached at nivedita_him@rediffmail.com or on Twitter, at @nivedita_Him.
This report was possible due to the WaterAid India’s Media Fellowship ‘WASH Matters 2019’ on the theme of ‘Urban Water’. This is the final and third part of the series of three reports, work for which was carried out from December 2019 till before lockdown in March 2020.
Read part one, on Jaipur’s water woes, here, and part two, on Delhi’s neediest when it comes to drinking water, here.