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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Thirsty Metropolis

Barely a year after torrential rains submerged large parts of Mumbai’s, the city’s water sources have fallen to critical levels and water rationing has returned. This year, a bad monsoon has led to Mumbai’s reservoirs falling to barely 9 percent of its capacity, forcing water cuts across India’s financial capital. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has halted supplies to construction sites and swimming pools, and tightened restrictions on commercial users. Predictably, the...

Thirsty Metropolis

Barely a year after torrential rains submerged large parts of Mumbai’s, the city’s water sources have fallen to critical levels and water rationing has returned. This year, a bad monsoon has led to Mumbai’s reservoirs falling to barely 9 percent of its capacity, forcing water cuts across India’s financial capital. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has halted supplies to construction sites and swimming pools, and tightened restrictions on commercial users. Predictably, the politicians blame a delayed monsoon. But blaming the weather alone is convenient and wrong. Mumbai’s water woes are not merely a meteorological problem but the result of decades of political complacency and administrative neglect. Mumbai receives roughly 2,000 mm of rainfall annually. Few global cities are blessed with such abundance. Yet, every year the city oscillates between flooding and scarcity, unable to capture excess water when the skies open and unable to conserve enough when they do not. Mumbai consumes around 4,000 million litres of water daily. More than 900 million litres of treated water reportedly disappear through leakages and illegal connections every day. Non-revenue water losses have climbed above 30 percent, substantially higher than they were fifteen years ago. In other words, the city loses more water through inefficiency than the size of its official supply deficit. Instead, successive administrations have preferred to search for another reservoir farther away. From Vihar in the nineteenth century to Tulsi, Tansa and eventually the Vaitarna system, the city’s answer to rising demand has always been to extend its hydraulic empire.
Such an approach may have worked when Mumbai was smaller. Today, it looks increasingly fragile in an era of climate volatility as a weak monsoon now threatens millions. Meanwhile, local water sources have been allowed to decay. The Mithi River, once a functioning ecosystem, has become an open drain carrying untreated sewage and industrial waste. Wetlands that naturally stored and filtered water have steadily shrunk under developmental pressure. Wells and ponds that historically provided resilience have largely disappeared from public policy. The tragedy is that Mumbai possesses solutions that it refuses to deploy at scale. Rainwater harvesting has been mandatory for many buildings for more than two decades. Yet enforcement remains patchy enough for corporators to demand audits of compliance. Wastewater reuse offers another missed opportunity. Mumbai treats only a fraction of the sewage it generates. The city that pioneered industrial water recycling in India during the 1960s has somehow failed to make reuse central to its twenty-first-century water strategy. India’s financial capital cannot continue treating every dry spell as an unforeseen emergency. Climate change will make rainfall even more erratic in future. In truth, Mumbai does not suffer from a lack of water. It suffers from a lack of imagination. Until politicians focus less on announcing new projects and more on reviving wetlands, harvesting rain and recycling wastewater, every monsoon will remain a gamble.

Warring MVA allies take their fight to Pawar

With the Congress and Shiv Sena-UBT sparring over around 15 seats with threats of even going independent, Sharad Pawar has stepped in to keep the MVA intact

Pawar

Mumbai: Temperatures in Maharashtra are soaring and its not just the mercury that spiraling upwards. Frenetic discussions and arguments among constituents of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) are raising the heat as the seat sharing arrangement is yet inconclusive. Sharad Pawar, reckoned as the architect of the MVA, has been roped in to quell the controversy with leaders of the Congress and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena making urgent visits to the senior leader’s office. With no consensus in sight, Aditya Thackeray met Pawar in an attempt to seek his mediation in breaking the impasse.


The flashpoint, it is said, is over the seats in Vidarbha and Mumbai where neither the Shiv Sena-UBT nor the Congress currently have much of a presence. But traditionally, the area has elected Congress candidates which is the reason the party is refusing to concede those constituencies to the Sena.


Sources say that the state unit of the Congress has urged its party bosses not to give in to the Shiv Sena-UBT’s “unreasonable demands”. The deadlock is reportedly over 15 seats mostly in Vidarbha where both parties want to increase their presence.


The two parties have been putting up a strong stance with neither willing to blink first. If Sanjay Raut irked Congress leader Nana Patole by commenting that the Maharashtra Congress cannot take a decision, Congress leaders sent signals that they wouldn’t hesitate to walk out of the alliance if Uddhav Thackeray doesn’t relent.


While Pawar is working the phone lines with the Congress top brass in Delhi, Vijay Wadettiwar announced that while the impasse continues on “six to seven seats in Vidarbha”, the MVA is intact seat sharing arrangement might be finalised by Tuesday evening. Vidarbha has traditionally been a Congress stronghold and while it may not have a widespread presence there at present, the party is challenging the SS-UBT’s insistence on fielding candidates there.


It is said that prominent constituencies such as Ramtek, Warora and Nagpur South. Similarly, there are a few seats in Mumbai where the Congress feels it stands a better chance than the Shiv Sena-UBT. The Shiv Sena-UBT may give up its claim on certain key seats in Vidarbha which have been held by the Congress for years until a BJP wave swept across this eastern part of Maharashtra that has, for long, experienced neglect and farm distress.


Another flashpoint is believed to be the Bandra East constituency which was won by the Congress’s Zeeshan Siddiqui last time. While Siddiqui has switched over Ajit Pawar’s party, the Congress wants to stake claim to this seat which has a sizeable Muslim population. However, Thackeray’s nephew Varun Sardesai has started increasing his presence in the area with the Sena-UBT demanding that constituency.

Pawar’s meetings with leaders from both parties indicate that the NCP-SP supremo is the one who can play the mediator between the warring factions considering he is believed to be the one who had stitched together the alliance between unlikely partners with contrasting political ideologies. Party sources say that Pawar has spoken to the top bosses of both, the Shiv Sena-UBT and the Congress, underlining the need for the MVA to stay intact.

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