The Federal capital is facing an acute shortage of some 98 million gallons of water per day. Its daily requirement is 180 million gallons. Some of the city’s sectors have lost complete access to drinking water – clean or otherwise!

The Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA) has been supplying arsenic-free drinking water among people in some parts of the dried tract for the last couple of years.
Sources said the BMDA has a target to construct 620 more installations to supply the safe drinking water through pipeline by the forthcoming June.
The initiative was taken to reduce the acute crisis of drinking water in the drought-prone Barind area especially during the dry season.

Despite new lakes being announced every year in its budget, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has been found wanting when it comes to their upkeep. Mid-way through the summer, some of the major lakes in the city have already dried or are close to drying up. The water levels have gone down drastically in some of the bigger lakes, including Kankaria, Vastrapur and Lambha, while Chandola in Danilimbda has completely dried up. The source of water for almost all these lakes, including the eleven under the interlinking project, is storm water.

New Delhi: After a delay of some years, the controversial groundwater Bill is finally ready to be presented to the Delhi cabinet. Government sources say the draft is likely to be tabled in the monsoon session of the Delhi assembly and, if passed, will make groundwater a chargeable asset in the capital. The cess on extraction will be decided at a later stage when the final points of the Bill will be prepared before it is turned into law.

The project, to be launched in the second week of May, has been named after socialist icon Dr Ram Manohar Lohia as he had always raised the issues of farmers, according to PWD and Irrigation Minister Shivpal Singh Yadav. Giving details of the project to expand irrigation facilities across the state, Yadav said on Saturday that the government has earmarked Rs 3,000 crore for setting up new tubewells in the state.

The government on Thursday signed a $75 million financing agreement with the World Bank to provide safe water for around 1.6 million people.
The Bangladesh Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project, modelled on private-public partnership, targets residents living in 380 unions of 20 districts with high arsenic or saline infiltration.
The Economic Relations Division’s senior secretary, Iqbal Mahmood, and the World Bank’s country director, Ellen Goldstein, signed the agreement in Dhaka.

Shillong, April 12: Twenty-first century Meghalaya still faces problems of open defecation, accessibility to sources of lighting and potable water, although the scenario has marginally improved compared to a decade ago, especially in the field of communication. In the 2011 census, the population was recorded at 29,64,007 (14,92,668 males and 14,71,339 females) and the decennial growth rate stood at a staggering 27.82 per cent.

Most political parties and media have passionately supported the Supreme Court ruling in the 2G spectrum case, that the government should auction natural resources and not allot them or allow unregulated extraction (as in iron ore mining). The Comptroller and Auditor General has fuelled this public passion by estimating huge losses to the exchequer through failure to auction natural resources like spectrum and coal.

PARADIP: With wells running dry and water tables depleting throughout the State, this is feared to be a dry summer. The impact is already being felt in Jagatsinghpur district. Many villages here are facing acute water shortage. To address the issue, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had laid foundation stone for a piped water supply project at Goda in 2003 with a deadline to complete it in a year. The project was estimated at Rs 4.58 crore and was to improve water supply to 40 villages of Goda, Gadharishpur, Janakadeipur and Padampur panchayats of Erasama block.