NEW DELHI: After facing water crisis for months, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday said that the government’s experiments have proven to be a major success as for the first time in 15-20 years, the national capital’s water production levels have increased from 930 MGD (million gallons per day) to 990 MGD.
“We are trying to augment Delhi’s water production capacity both by implementing measures internally and asking the Centre to increase Delhi’s share of water through neighbouring states. We are also making efforts at our own level to implement the most advanced water management systems to increase water supply throughout Delhi using internal sources,” said Kejriwal.
He went on an on-ground inspection of two lakes being developed around the Rohini STP and said, “We’ll supply treated water from Rohini STP to nearby lakes which will increase groundwater levels which can later be put to use via tube wells.”
With 930 MGD, the water production in the city remained stagnated for the past 25 to 30 years. “There is a need for improvement given the rise of population over the years. The current water availability is the same as it used to be in the 1990s, when the population was less.”
He added, “Delhi gets water supply from the neighbouring states. The allocation of water supply for Delhi was decided by the Supreme Court in the 90s, and has remained the same since. There has been no increase despite a 2.5 times jump in population. Hence, we are running two parallel efforts to expand the production and availability of water for Delhi residents.”
He added, “We have inspected the Rohini STP, which treats 15 MGD of wastewater every day. Earlier, the water used to be disseminated into the Yamuna and was not utilized further. The water post treatment has a purity of 25:30 BOD:TSS, while it needs to be below 3:3 for the water to be potable. Hence, there was ample scope of improvement in terms of quality of water, which was previously wasted by being tossed into the Yamuna.”