NEW DELHI: Despite strict regulations in place, declining groundwater levels in the city's south and southwest districts has prompted the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) to take up the matter with Delhi chief secretary P K Tripathi who in turn has notified Delhi Jal Board (DJB), the nodal agency for monitoring and regulating the city's ground water resources.
In a letter, CGWA chairman Dr SC Dhiman, has said that levels of groundwater have fallen the maximum in south and southwest Delhi, the first two areas to have been notified for ground water extraction and where officials have allegedly been keeping a strict watch on illegal extractions.
He has said that in 2010-11 only about 350 permissions were granted for borewells by the district advisory committee despite which groundwater levels continued to dip.
This, Dhiman alleged, was because the committee was concentrating on clearing projects instead of regulating the illegal extraction of water.
"DJB has always been under tremendous pressure from MLAs to clear borewell projects for their respective constituencies. Despite that officials have been taking utmost care in granting clearance to only extremely urgent projects. Once it came to our notice that levels have been falling despite all measures, we have written to all MLAs, asking them to nominate only very special and necessary projects," said sources in DJB.
The water utility has also formulated rules for borewell digging that will maximize the lives of the projects and ensure longer ground water supply to areas.
These include ensuring a minimum distance of 200-250m between each tubewell to avoid a clash of zone influence, ensuring that old tubewells, for which reboring is being done, are sealed completely to avoid misuse, running borewells for a restricted time period of four hours each in the morning and evening, restricting capacity of submersible pumps to 5 HP and sending monthly reports to DC (revenue) south after completing work.
Sources said that regulation and monitoring of ground water resources is supposed to have been a joint effort between DJB, the revenue department and police and it was the latter two agencies which were responsible for ensuring that rules were being complied with.
"Monitoring of borewells and ensuring that illegal extraction does not take place is the responsibility of the DC of each area.
"However, they claim they do not have sufficient manpower to monitor each area closely. Reports have also been received of
collusion between government officials and property owners to facilitate illegal boring.
"In some cases people had taken permission to set up a rainwater harvesting structure but instead used it to extract water illegally. Concerned agencies should not spare defaulters," said a government official.
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