Water scarcity is the biggest issue in Dwarka

As the signal turns red at a crossroads near Dabri, Vimla Devi scurries through queues of waiting cars, auto-rickshaws, buses and trucks. She reaches a water tanker, hurriedly loosens the nozzle of its leaking outlet and starts filling up her bucket.

The driver of the tanker notices her in his rear view mirror, but the signal turns green and Vimla, carrying her half-filled bucket, rushes back to the sidewalk. He hurls some abuses at her and then speeds away towards Dwarka.

He will have to deliver the water to one of the high-rise apartment buildings that dot the sub-city on the western fringe of Delhi. Vimla, however, waits for the next tanker to halt at the crossroads.

She has to fill up four more buckets, before her son and daughter come and help her take them home at the nearby Harijan Basti.

While tankers bring relief to the well-offs living in high-rises and Delhi Development Authority’s housing complexes in parched Dwarka, the likes of Vimla and her construction worker husband Pawan Kumar, who live in slums and unauthorised colonies around the sub-city, have no particular source of water to rely on and have to depend on pilferage. 

No wonder, a bench of Delhi High Court last September took note of ‘hijacking’ of DDA’s water tankers by ‘mobs’ from areas around Dwarka and observed: “This is the beginning of water wars. The situation will worsen in some years”.

No wonder, as the National Capital Territory goes to polls once again, water crisis is the key issue dominating the electioneering in Dwarka.

“We will vote anyone who can give us a firm commitment to do whatever it takes to end water crisis in our locality,” said Rajesh Kumar, who lives in Dashrath Puri, one of the 44 unauthorised colonies in the Assembly constituency of Dwarka, and runs a grocery nearby.

Commitments are galore ahead of February 7 polls though. So are accusations and counter-accusations among the candidates in the fray.

The BJP’s Pradyuman Rajput accuses Mahabal Mishra of the Congress for not taking any step to end the water crisis, although the latter had been an MLA from Dwarka and an MP from west Delhi for years.

Mishra won the Assembly poll in 2008, but vacated the seat after winning parliamentary elections from west Delhi in 2009. Rajput won the by-election in 2009 and retained the Assembly seat in 2013 polls too.

“The BJP now not only controls the municipal council, but also leads the Union government. What did it do to end the water woes of Dwarka?” asks Mishra, who primarily relies on his “poorvanchali” (migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) vote bank for his electoral fortune.

“The BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi did in just eight months what the Congress-led UPA government did not do during its 10-year-long tenure,” retorts Rajput, citing the Bill Modi government got passed by Lok Sabha on December 16 last to extend protection to unauthorised constructions in the national capital till 2017.

Rajput also claims that the new BJP government in Haryana would also do its bit to end the water woes of west Delhi by supplying Yamuna water through Munak Canal and thus making the hitherto non-functional water treatment plant in Dwarka operational.

To take on Mishra and Rajput, the Aam Aadmi Party has fielded late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s grandson Adarsh Shastri, who left his job as sales head of Apple India to join Arvind Kejriwal’s movement.

“I promised to build an underground reservoir within a year to ensure water to every household in four years,” says Shashtri, as he walks through the warrens of alleys in Mohan Block – one of the 44 colonies Dwarka consists of – with his party activists and seeks votes. He also promises to build new sewer system in the area within a year.  

“It’s easier to make promises and they all do this ahead of polls. The question is whom we trust this time,” Chandravati, a homemaker in Raghu Nagar, says.