To solve water crisis, green court puts Haryana on notice (HT)
Sareen Dwarka
To solve water crisis, green court puts Haryana on notice (HT))
30 Oct 2014 Hindustan Times (Delhi)Darpan Singh darpan...@hindustantimes.com
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NEW DELHI: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has asked Haryana government officers to appear before it to resolve water-related disputes and ensure better supply to Delhi. Much of the water needed for Delhi’s drinking purposes passes through Haryana and hence disputes needed to be resolved for better supplies to Delhi.
The demand-supply water deficit in Delhi is about 300 million gallons per day.
The green court believed that this would help reduce the use of illegal bore wells in the Capital — a menace that is causing already depleting water levels to further go down.
The demand-supply water deficit in Delhi is about 300 million gallons per day, resulting in use of illegal bore wells. This causes groundwater level depletion by almost 1.44 metres per year.
The NGT on Wednesday issued notices to Haryana’s secretaries for environment and forest, besides water resources, and asked them to appear on December 10.
The green court’s notices came after the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) stated that their treatment plants in Narela and Bawana industrial clusters had been lying idle for nine years because there was not enough water. In a recent crackdown, 80 government teams surveyed 10,000 units and sealed 1,155 illegal bore wells in Narela and Bawana where DJB supplied only 0.112 million litres per day as against the required demand of 33.85 MLD.
The tribunal on Wednesday sets up a multi- department panel headed by Delhi’s chief secretary to know how much more water is needed, the money collected by DJB in Narela and Bawana and how it has been spent.
The committee will also identify places where DJB should extract groundwater, and also treatment mechanism for supplies. It will quantify the cess to be paid by each industrial unit for consumption of water.