BENGALURU: Karnataka is reeling under severe drinking water crisis, and the government has declared 3,122 regions as severely affected as far as drinking water is concerned.
According to the Department of Rural Development & Panchayat Raj (RDPR), out of 176 taluks in the state, 138 have very low groundwater levels. “The priorities of the government need to change -- from water for irrigation to water for drinking, before the crisis goes out of hand,” said an official.
To this end, the state is planning to come up with a water grid on the lines of power grid, to supply drinking water through dedicated water pipelines, which would source drinking water from sustainable water sources - the reservoirs, Chief Secretary T M Vijay Bhaskar told The New Indian Express.
He added that RDPR has been asked to submit a feasibility report on ‘Jaldhara’ -- the Rs 50,000 crore scheme to supply piped drinking water to all villages across the state.
Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy has been briefed by the Chief Secretary as well as the principal secretaries to the departments of water resources, rural development and urban development on the short- and long-term plans that need to be addressed immediately to resolve the drinking water woes.
As a contingency plan, the government has set up 24X7 control rooms in the districts, which are receiving and addressing drinking water-related grievances from the public, and water is being supplied through tankers to the affected areas. “A limit of 40 litres of water per person per day has been fixed for distribution. Tankers have been instructed to start water supply from 7 am onwards,” said the Chief Secretary.
Water experts, however, have their own doubts regarding crisis management in the absence of any comprehensive data on water in the state.
“The government is talking of water management in the absence of any data,” said Dr V S Prakash, founder and former special director of the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Center.
“Water is distributed in various components of hydrological cycles. Large-scale management of water requires basic information of availability of water at the village level.
There is ample data on the global scale, but there’s no data at the village level to advise the farmer at his land parcel level,” said Dr Prakash.