JAIPUR: An increase in demand for water in Jaipur at a time when availability is short, has led to major problems for its residents. However, the public health and engineering department started supplying more water from
Bisalpur Dam from Saturday in the city.
Till Friday, the city was getting 506 million litres per day (MLD) but from Saturday, it started supplying 20 MLD more water for the city. “The requirement of the city for water has increased with the rise in temperature. To meet the increasing demand, we have started supplying more water,” said
Dinesh Saini, additional chief engineer (Jaipur region), PHED.
More than 15% of the water requirement is fulfilled from
groundwater supplied through tankers. There are a lot of areas on the periphery the city which are still not connected with pipelines to get Bisalpur water. They have to rely on groundwater heavily. Since, the PHED has yet to lay down water pipelines in these areas for supplying Bisalpur water, every day it has to extract 70 MLD of ground water through tubewells. Besides, the rest of the areas are getting 456 MLD of water from Bisalpur dam.
Besides, Bisalpur Dam has limited water as the water is supplied from the dam not only to Jaipur but also to
Ajmer and Tonk. According to the PHED officials, the capacity of Bisalpur is 38,000 million cubic feet (TMC) but it has only 13 TMC of water available at the moment. Out of 13 TMC, seven TMC is not to be used as it has to be maintained for aquatic life and ecological balance.
Officials said that at present the situation is that water from Bisalpur dam can be supplied till October. If the water is supplied from Bisalpur dam and if there is no significant rainfall, it will not be possible to supply water from Bisalpur dam from October onwards.
To meet the requirement of water, PHED is planning to draw ground water. It is planning to dig at least 50 tubewells in the city. Officials said that water level in existing tubewell continuously goes down due to extraction of water every day.
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