Residents cry for water, Delhi Jal Board in no hurry to respond (Times of India 13 June 2012)

NEW DELHI: Ruma Roy has spent Rs 6,000 on purchasing water from private tankers in the past one month and a half. Her house in south Delhi's Gulmohar Park has been getting Delhi Jal Board supply only once a week, if she is "lucky". DJB has neither responded to calls for tankers nor explained why the problem persists.
Roy is among thousands of Delhiites who have been facing water problems for an extended period of time for no ostensible reason. One day out of the blue the supply was disrupted and has not been restored since then. In Vasant Vihar's block F-8, there has been no water since the past two months. Repeated complaints to DJB have yielded a site visit or two by officials but no remedy has been found.
"If there is a problem at our end, we are willing to have it sorted out. However, whenever DJB staff does come, they say nothing except that the problem will be looked into. We have spent more than two months like this. Someone said we are at the tail-end of the supply line but some houses are getting water while others are not. There is obviously some other issue," said a resident of F-8 block.
In Ashok Vihar, residents have been complaining of contaminated water supply since November 2011 but there has been no improvement in their water so far. PL Sharma, a resident of B-block says that people waste a huge amount of water each day by letting the contaminated water flow away.
"On one hand there is a shortage of water. On the other, while we are getting a proper supply at least once a day, we cannot use the water since it is so filthy. It's also become routine for the supply to not come at all sometimes. We have complained to DJB but nothing has been done," he says.
The Jal Board has faced some problems in the past two weeks over its water supply but officials say that distribution is actually much better at present than it has ever been. Except, for various odd reasons, several of which can be attributed to an old system of pipes that sprout leaks and have been victim to illegal tapping, many parts of the city are facing a huge crisis.
"DJB probably needs to go back to its overhead tank system. The present system of underground reservoirs requires too much power and the pressure of water being supplied is just not sufficient in areas that are even slightly away. In our colony, supply comes once between 3.30am and 6.30am. Every third day the supply is disrupted," said Rajiv Kakria, a resident of GK-I.
These are residents of authorized colonies. In several unauthorized areas and slums, water is supplied either exclusively through tankers or through borewells. In water samples picked up from 20 slums in southwest and west Delhi, high levels of e-coli contamination have been detected in most groundwater samples. Nahida, a middle-aged woman living in west Delhi's Darbhanga slum, says, "This is the water that was supplied in the slum two days back through the DJB pipeline. We had to let the water sit for a while so that the sediments settled down and then boil the water before drinking it. We have a tubewell too but the water is so dirty that we use it only for washing," she says.