This summer, people will face twin crises — groundwater depletion and probable contamination of piped water.
Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) has offered help to end the first crisis but hardly any solution is in sight to check contamination of piped water.
On Wednesday, urban development and housing department principal secretary Chaitanya Prasad issued an order, asking all urban local bodies to supply drinking water from tankers in the areas facing depleting water table. While the water would be filled in the tankers at the pump houses of the civic bodies but none of them has a tangible plan to test the groundwater conditions.
Patna municipal commissioner Kapil Ashok Shirshat said on Thursday: “We dont have any mechanism for testing purity of water being supplied by the municipal corporation. Testing of the municipal water supply is done only upon receiving any complaint from residents. The testing is done at the laboratory of public health engineering department.”
While Shirshat readily accepted the lack of testing facility, health experts raised concerns over a number of water-borne diseases due to contaminated water supply.
Consequently, nearly half of Patna’s two million residents dependent on municipal water supply may stare upon a host of water-related health hazards, including diarrhoea. “Consumption of contaminated water leads to a number of chronic ailments related to stomach and liver. People from a number of localities dependent on municipal water supply keep complaining about serious water-related diseases, including jaundice, typhoid and dysentery,” said physician Diwakar Tejaswi.
Patna has 102 water pump houses. Water is pumped from the dug wells at the pump houses and supplied directly to houses through pipelines. However, an estimated 25 million litres of total 132 million litres supplied from the pump houses are wasted because of damaged pipelines.
As per the latest public health engineering department report, the groundwater level in Patna has fallen from 17ft-2inch below ground level measured in March-April 2015 to 18ft-5inch at present. As a result, the municipal pump houses and private bore wells and tube wells in the city are facing difficulties in pumping out water.
Around 60 per cent of the urban population of Patna is dependent on private bore wells, which normally extract water from 200-300ft below ground level. However, because of the water level depletion, the pumps are not able to extract water easily at times.
Municipal commissioner Shirshat too admitted that the discharge from the municipal pump houses has lately reduced and at times sand also comes out along with water.
Patna apart, groundwater table has been observed in other parts of the state as well, especially in southern and central parts of the state. For instance, Nalanda, Gaya, Aurangabad, Kaimur and Sheikhpura have witnessed fall in the water table up to 1.5ft, while up to 1ft drop in the groundwater level has been observed in Nawada, Buxar, Rohtas and Jamui districts.
The fall in the water table has been attributed to deficient monsoon rainfall in the state over the past four years. While the rainfall has remained scanty, the recharge of groundwater has also been quite less because of unchecked urbanisation, felling of trees and lack of rainwater harvesting practices among others.
“There is over-exploitation of groundwater in the state despite abundance of surface water. Based on the current trend in water demand and population growth in the state, it might also face serious groundwater scarcity over the next 15-20 years, if measures are not taken to keep a tab on its over-exploitation,’’ said Ashok Ghosh, member of the state-level expert appraisal committee, the technical committee of State Environment Impact Assessment Authority.
