Ranchi, April 27: Battling water crisis, a plush city hotel is digging deep for a solution, leaving the residents in the surrounding areas displeased.

Bore holes or narrow shafts drilled into the ground for extracting water have failed to give results. Take the posh Hotel Capitol Hill, a unit of Dinanath Hotel Private Limited, for instance. After three deep bore holes failed, the process of digging a fourth started today.

Labourers started with the work in the morning, which is likely to continue till late at night. The expected depth of the bore hole is 600ft, which is almost equal to the depth of the three previous bore holes — all failures.

Anbu Driller, that has its office at Ashok Nagar, has taken up the work to provide adequate water to the commercial complex, which houses shops, plush rooms and banquet halls. Drill machines, a truck and pipes have been pressed into service.

Work on the bore hole has raised many eyebrows among the poor residents of Hindpiri living in the surrounding area, who were heard discussing laws to check such a practice.

“There must be some law to put a check on this. In case this bore hole attempt is a success, we will have to suffer from water crisis. Today, I have noticed that the water level of my well has gone down and several tube wells were are also not working,” said Mohammed Siraj, a resident of Hindpiri while discussing the powers of the Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) and Ranchi Regional Development Authority (RRDA).

Officials of the district administration, who were supposed to do have taken relevant action in this direction, too, were helpless. Deputy commissioner Avinash Kumar, Ranchi Municipal Corporation administrator Vinay Kumar Choubey and Ranchi Regional Development Authority secretary, S.S. Mandilwar conveniently passed the buck on the drinking water and sanitation department (DWSD).

But ground water wing director of DWSD, S.L.S. Jageshwar, pointed out that no law has been made to check this problem and those thinking on taking legal action are only wasting their time.

“We do not have any rule to put a check on deep hole boring like several other states. One can make bore holes of any depth to fetch water without taking permission,” Jageshwar said.

And on sensing trouble, the president of Capitol Hill, Ravindra Singh, denied any boring work on his hotel campus. “No boring work is going on at our hotel. We are cleaning one of our old bore holes which was choked due to clogging of iron content,” he said.