Hindustan Times 18.01.2010
BMC puts water cut plan on holdAfter opposition from major political parties, the civic administration on Saturday decided to put on hold the once-a-week 100 per cent water cut.
A senior official from water department said the plan
of implementing ‘once a week-no water day’ in mid January has kept aside for next few weeks.
Anil Diggikar, additional municipal commissioner, said, “We will review the situation and decide on it later.”
Due to poor monsoon and scanty rainfall, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has imposed 15 per cent water cut on domestic users and 30 per cent for commercial users.
Currently, the total water stock in all the six lakes is only 6.34 lakh million litres as against 8.44 lakh million litres last year.
The BMC had planned to implement its ‘once-a-week no-water scheme’ for two weeks on a trial basis starting mid-January.
Last week, Water Resources Minister Ajit Pawar said an additional 1.99 million litres of water would be made available from the carryover stock of Bhatsa and Upper Vaitarna dams in Thane district.
This prompted the mayor to organise a meeting of all political party leaders in the civic head quarter on Saturday.
All leaders opposed the ‘once-a-week-dry day’ policy.
“This gap of 2 lakh litres of water has been bridged by the state government. So ideally there should not be once a week water cut,” said Niyaz Vanu, Nationalist Congress Party leader in the BMC.
