More tankers deployed in state this year

MUMBAI: The whole of Marathwada is reeling from an unprecedented drinking water shortage, with dams in the region filled to less than 8% of their capacity. The state government has pressed into service about 1,500 tankers to provide drinking water to 1,065 villages and 377 hamlets in the eight districts of the region. Last year, on the same day, only 150 tankers had needed to be operated, indicating the severity of the current crisis.
Across the state, 2,215 tankers are being operated to bring drinking water to 1,625 villages and 2,096 hamlets, against the 300 tankers operated at the same time last year.
Water resources minister Girish Mahajan admitted that the situation across the state, and Marathwada in particular, is grim. He said the government will take all possible steps to tackle the crisis. “We have initiated a massive irrigation plan,” Mahajan said. “I am sure the results will be visible next year. Once our projects are complete, the drinking water situation will be much better.”
A senior bureaucrat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the Nagpur region was largely unaffected by the water crisis. Apart from the five tankers engaged to provide drinking water to Nagpur, so far none were operating in Wardha, Gondia, Bhandara, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli districts in the region.
He said Marathwada appears to be the worst-affected. Tankers are supplying drinking water in all the eight districts of the region: Aurangabad, Jalna, Beed, Parbhani, Hingoli, Nanded, Osmanabad and Latur. The most number of tankers, 431, are deployed in Aurangabad. There are 361 of them operating in Beed and 219 in Jalna.
There are 90 tankers supplying drinking water in the Konkan region, 400 in the Nashik region, 70 in the Pune region, and 100 in the Amravati region.
The bureaucrat said, in perhaps a first in recent times, tankers from private organisations had been hired for supplying drinking water, in addition to the government ones. “The demand for providing drinking water by tankers is steadily increasing,” he said. “We will have to tackle it on a war footing. If the monsoon is delayed, then it will be a crisis for the state.”
The bureaucrat said although several parts of the state had faced drought and drinking water shortages for more than two decades, no serious efforts were made to address the problem.
“We should have laid emphasis on water conservation programmes, put stringent restrictions on the exploitation of ground water and undertaken measures to recharge the water table,” he said, blaming the current drinking water shortages on those failures.