MUMBAI: With monsoon playing truant and water levels depleting rapidly in the lakes in Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) was forced to adopt an emergency measure to impose a 30 percent water cut effective from Tuesday.
The water situation in the entire state is grim, warned a state government irrigation department official.
The additional municipal commissioner of the BMC told reporters that there will be curbs on swimming pools in five-star hotels, construction sites, and washing centers of the local bus and railways. Hotels have been told to make their own arrangements for the swimming pools, but as it is hard to get water supply from other sources, the hotel industry has decided to keep the swimming pools closed.
The BMC was also exploring the option of tapping water from nearly 2,000 bore wells as a partial solution and investigating the possibility of harvesting rain in the future.
The heavy weekend rains were not enough, say city officials.
The Monthly Review of the Indian Economy, May 2009 published by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has stated that the reservoirs levels in Maharashtra have dropped by 17.6 percent over the past year, while nationally the levels are down by 34 percent.
“By end-April 2009, live water storage levels in 81 major reservoirs stood at 25.6 Billion Cubic Meters (BCM) compared to 40.2 bcm a year ago. This indicates a sharp decline of 34 percent,” the CMIE report stated.
Water levels were at just 17.4 percent of the live storage capacity of the reservoirs, with the onset of southwest monsoon still away, water levels across major reservoirs will decline further.
In another development, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, who was admitted to a hospital here on Monday, underwent a successful angioplasty surgery on Tuesday. According to Sena leaders who visited him, Thackeray’s condition was stable but he was still in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the hospital for observation and would be shifted out to special room, after few days.
