If the rest of the country is counting the cost of fuel, Darjeeling is calculating the price of something far more basic, drinking water.
The Darjeeling Truck Chalak Association (water supply unit) has proposed a hike of ₹500 per truck/tanker that fetches water from a distance of around 12km from the city centre.
Water trucks ferry drinking water to hotels, restaurants and even households as the Darjeeling municipality fails to meet the need.
These tankers bring water from near Rangbull and around the 3rd Mile area. Each truck ferries 6,000 litres of water, and according to the proposal, the rate will range from ₹1,700 (to Batasia), ₹2,800 (to Chowrasta) and ₹3,000 (to Singamari).
Bal Kumar Tamang, the president of the water supply unit, said: “We recently held a meeting and decided to hike the rates as the current rate has not been revised for the past five to six years. The rate of everything has increased since then.”
Around 130 trucks ferry water to Darjeeling town, and 90 of them are members of the truck association.
On Tuesday, one litre of petrol cost ₹114.95 and diesel ₹101.76 in Darjeeling.
Tamang has said that “bigger hotels” demand around four to five trucks of water daily during the current peak season. “We can ply only after 6pm and during the night; we can at most supply four trucks of water because of the present traffic congestion,” said Tamang.
The Darjeeling Hoteliers’ Association (DHA) has requested the truck association to hike the rate by 10 per cent of the actuals paid by their members rather than a flat ₹500 increase per truck.
“We have decided to sit for a meeting with the truck association tomorrow,” said Reggie Lama, secretary, DHA.
The water crisis is acute, but the Darjeeling municipality is unable to solve it.
“Against the need of 6.4 million gallons of water per day in the Darjeeling civic area, we can only supply around 1.2 million gallons during the dry season,” said a source in the civic body.
The Darjeeling municipality sources its water from North Lake, which has a storage capacity of 20 million gallons and South Lake (13.5 million gallons). The two lakes get water from 22 feeder streams.
Water collected from another lake, Sindhap (14 million), also feeds the two north and south lakes near Tiger Hill.
According to the 2011 census, the Darjeeling municipality’s population is 1,02,414.
The civic body has not been able to complete a ₹204.8 crore AMRUT drinking water project, which had started in 2018 and was to be completed by 2021.
Even though AMRUT 1.0 is yet to be completed, the Centre sanctioned a further ₹298.60 crore in April 2025 under AMRUT 2.0 for the municipal area.
“This includes ₹238 crore for essential drinking water supply works and ₹60 crore for constructing a new reservoir at Senchel,” Darjeeling MP Raju Bista had said earlier.
In the past, there were allegations that Darjeeling civic authorities had demanded ₹2 lakh for a water connection, against an official rate of ₹17,500. An audio recording regarding the allegation was widely circulated, even though this newspaper could not independently verify its authenticity. Other allegations include the allocation of water connections to select individuals.