Current water supply system broken...Go back to rainwater harvesting says Narain

New Delhi: The current water supply system that involves fetching water from distant places is broken and cities need to adopt rainwater harvesting to prepare for a warmer climate, noted environmentalist Sunita Narain has said.

Her remarks come as Delhi grapples with a severe water crisis amid a punishing heat wave. In an interaction with PTI editors, Narain said cities such as Delhi and Bengaluru waste or lose 50 to 60 per cent of water in distribution, but “that’s the nature of the current water supply system”.

According to Narain, the director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi should lift Yamuna water from Okhla -- the tail end of the Delhi stretch of the river -- and not from Wazirabad. This essentially means Delhi should clean up its sewage for drinking water purposes, she said. “I actually put this in a Planning Commission document. Of course, it was considered too inconvenient, but I did put it in.

“Every city should be required to take its drinking water at the end of its river, not at the beginning, which means that Delhi would have to draw its drinking water from Okhla and not Wazirabad. This means all the sewage of

Delhi is what you would drink,” said the environmentalist, who has served as a member of the government-appointed National Ganga River Basin Authority in the past.

“The hullabaloo about Delhi’s drinking water from Haryana... This system of water supply is broken. You get your water from so far away that you actually do not care anymore. You get your water from Tehri Dam (Uttarakhand), Himachal Pradesh, and Haryana through this very broken system. Haryana will also be giving you sewage tomorrow because as it grows, it will have no water,” she added. Narain said rivers would be critical for water supply in the future as the planet rapidly heats up.

“In a climate-variable period, you will get more rain, and it will come in fewer days, which means your ability to manage floods is going to be critical, and you will have longer periods of drought.

“This is what you’re seeing today in Delhi, which means the system of water supply has to be fixed. Think about how you can capture the rain where and when it falls. Go back to rainwater harvesting,” she said.