New Delhi: With the water table in the national Capital depleting rapidly, ground water supplies in Delhi are likely to run dry in next nine years, a report published in a recent bulletin of Harvard Business School said.
"With their huge population, China and India are especially susceptible to these water stresses. Ground water supplies in Delhi are expected to run dry by 2015,” the report on the global water crisis said.
Another report by the Centre for Science and Environment said things would have been better if ground water had not been over exploited. The national Capital has been witnessing a huge gap between demand and supply of water, it said adding the city, with over 15 million population, requires about 3,324 million litres per day (MLD) water but gets only 2,034 MLD.
The report blamed the widening gap in large-scale extraction of the natural resource, which has also led to depletion of water levels. A comparison of water levels from 1962 to 1977, 1977 to 1983 and 1983 to 1995 presents a clear picture of depletion of ground water level in different parts of the city. In 1977, the water table was by and large within six metres in most parts of Delhi with deepest being 23 metre at Mehrauli block near Qutab Minar.
The water table declined to 10 metre by 1983 and in 1995 it was in the range of 10 to 20 metres, the deepest being 35 metres at Gadaipur in Chattarpur basin of Mehrauli block, said a CSE report on Rain Water Harvesting.
Delhi has total area of 1486 sq kms out of which fully developed urban area is 525 sq kms. The City's population is expected to reach 17.5 million by end of 2007 and the water requirement is likely to go to 1050 million gallon per day.
The major sources of surface water to the city are rivers Yamuna, Ganga and Ravi-Beas (Bhakra storage), while the total ground water availability in the capital is in the order of 290 Million Cubic Metre (MCM) per year, the CSE report said.
The Delhi Jal Board is supplying about 660 MGD of potable water. The expansion of the city to the suburbs has also led to rise in excessive exploitation of ground water due to unavailability of the water supply system to those localities. Almost 46 per cent of the population still does not have access to piped water, the report said. People in Mehrauli and Narela receive only 29 and 31 litres of water per person per day against the average per person water consumption in Delhi estimated at 240 litres per day.
Overdrawing of ground water has also affected the quality and in some areas it is unfit for human consumption, it said.
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