Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep in the ground along the waterway that traces Delhis eastern edge. From a shack a few feet away, they then drag thick hoses toward a queue of 20-odd tanker trucks idling quietly with their headlights turned off. The men work in a team: While one man fits a hoses mouth over a borehole, another clambers atop a truck at the front of the line and shoves the tubes opposite end into the empty steel cistern attached to the vehicles creaky frame.
Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment. Water work is night work, says a middle-aged neighbor who rents a house near the covert pumping station and requested anonymity. Bosses arrange buyers, labor fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says nothing to nobody. Tonight, that muscleburly, bearded, and in tight-fitting T-shirtshas little to do: Sitting near the trucks, the men are absorbed in a game of cards. At dawn, the crew switches off the generators, stows the hoses in the shack from which they came, and places the tarp back over the boreholes. Few traces of the nights frenetic activity remain.
Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the citys needs by at least 207 million gallons each day, according to a 2013 audit by the office of the Indian comptroller and auditor general. A quarter of Delhis households live without a piped-water connection; most of the rest receive water for only a few hours each day. So residents have come to rely on private truck ownersthe most visible strands of a dispersed web of city councilors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water each day from illicit boreholes, as well as the citys leaky pipe network, and sell the liquid for profit.
The entrenched system has a local moniker: the water-tanker mafia. Although the exact number of boreholes created by this network is unknown, in 2001 the figure in Delhi stood at roughly 200,000, according to a government report, while the 2013 audit found that the city loses 60 percent of its water supply to leakages, theft, and a failure to collect revenue. The mafia defends its work as a community service, but there is a much darker picture of Delhis subversive water industry: one of a thriving black market populated by small-time freelance agents who are exploiting a fast-depleting common resource and in turn threatening Indias long-term water security.
Groundwater accounts for 85 percent of Indias drinking-water supply, according to a 2010 World Bank report. The country continues to urbanize, however, and a little more than half its territory is now severely water-stressed; more than 100 million Indians live in places with critically polluted water sources, according to India Water Tool 2.0, a local mapping platform. The tanker mafia is only worsening this problem. In 2014, the government reported that nearly three-fourths of Delhis underground aquifers were over-exploited. This means that boreholes must go deeper and deeper to find water, making it increasingly likely that hoses are sucking up liquid laced with dangerous contaminants. In 2012, the countrys Water Resources Ministry found excess fluoride, iron, and even arsenic in groundwater pockets.
Yet the mafia continues to thrive as the local demand balloons. When boreholes dry up and more drilling leads to nothing, pumping crews just look farther afield, toward or even past Delhis borders. This has created a vast extraction zone, where the thirsty metropolis gives way to a parched hinterland. And recognizing a business model that works, the mafia is putting down roots or spawning copycats in other cities and towns.
And so the tanker mafia was born. It quickly grew and morphed, in step with a widening gap in water distribution. The 2013 government audit found that colonies received, on average, 1 gallon of water per person per day, while in central Delhihome to politicians, judges, and other elitesthe number was 116 gallons. Sanghwan, like other soon-to-be tanker bosses, bought two trucks to ferry water from illegal boreholes along the Yamuna to an underground cistern he had put in his land, and smaller vehicles to make deliveries to thirsty residents across Sangam Vihar.
The mafia has gained other, wealthier customers too. Over the past decade, Delhi has become home to a vast number of water-intensive establishments: malls, office towers, and hotels that need floors mopped, lawns watered, and toilets flushed. The government cleared projects based on the assumption that necessary infrastructure would be put in place, but that has rarely happened. Instead, sleek buildings have been erected atop old, dripping pipes that cant possibly supply them with water. No one, not even the DJB, knows the water network, said a private consultant to the government water agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. There is no master plan, no blueprint.
New facilities have thus gone searching for help. And water bosses, ever eager for new clients and adept at capitalizing on government failures, have always been just a phone call away.
Customers are feeling the strain. You can fill as much water as you can each time the water comes from the DJB borewell, says Sangam Vihar resident Sunita, a domestic worker who goes by only one name. So everyone tries to buy as much storage as possible, because you never know when your turn will come again. For her family of six, Sunita has 660 gallons worth of storage capacity that lasts her about a week to 10 days at a time. If her turn to have running water does not come before her tanks run dry, she is forced to buy from a private tanker at a higher cost. Sunita estimates that she spends almost one-fifth of her salary on water. Her husband, whose income was crucial to balancing the monthly budget, has been sick for well over a year with chronic diarrhea, a water-borne disease.
Politicians and planners in Delhi, like their peers in many other parts of India, are eager to solve the citys water-supply problems with megaprojects. When they see a shortage, they begin discussing dams, miles-long pipelines, and massive pumping stations, often built with the help of private corporations. Already, some of the DJBs water supply comes from as far away as the Himalayas; the Tehri Dam, about 200 miles northeast of Delhi in Uttarakhand state, came online in 2006 for close to $1 billion. More recently, Delhi authorities have offered to pay 90 percent of the costs of a new dam in the countrys mountainous northeast that supposedly would supply the city with 275 million gallons of water per day.
The rush to sanction such projects is due in no small part to the potential scope of corruption: The more expensive and complex a scheme, the more opportunities there are to skim money. Unsurprisingly, graft is already well documented in Indias water sector. In 2012, for instance, a government whistle-blower revealed irregularities to the tune of $5.5 billion in a decades worth of irrigation projects in Maharashtra, the western state that is home to bustling Mumbai (and that metropoliss own water mafia).
Corruption is a big reason that major projects routinely flop, or at least fall well short of expectations, and these failures, in turn, are only giving water bosses more power. But counterintuitively, some water activists say, the mafia may offer lessons for a way out of Indias multifaceted water crisis, including an end to the black market.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/17...water-mafia-india-delhi-tanker-gang-scarcity/
That really is crazy. For some reason I have a conception of India is a country with a significant middle class, but then I read stories like this that just speaks of just shit infrastructure, corruption and poverty.
I guess this is why there is rampant shitting in the streets as well. No one has any freakin water to waste on toilets.