People wait to collect drinking water from the tanker as the city faces acute shortage of drinking water, in Northern hill town Shimla on Tuesday. (Express File Photo by Pradeep Kumar)
WITH MANY families leaving Shimla for their native places and schools closed owing to water crisis, Sunday did not see public protests and availability of water was improving, officials claimed.
Chief Secretary Vineet Chawdhry, who heads the committee to deal with the crisis, said “ things are showing much change since Saturday, especially after efforts to add Sutlej water at Gumma source.”
He claimed that scheduled supply in the localities, slated to get water, was also going on smoothly and by midnight, all left out areas would be covered.
Reports on Saturday night showed that availability of water from all sources had increased to 37.73 MLA, of which Gumma only had 17.62 MLD of water and Giri also showing availability of 16 MLD. Earlier, the total availability had dropped as low as 18.77 MLD on May 27.
“Till 5 pm on Sunday, 18.44 MLD of water was available to the Shimla Municipal Corporation, which is expected to increase substantially by midnight,” said Joginder Chauhan, additional commissioner (legal).
Meanwhile, five lakh litres of water was carried to Gumma by 27 tankers deployed at initiative of Raj Kumar Verma of Sai Engineering Foundation, a trust that was entrusted the job by Governor Acharya Devvrat.
Sampuran Singh, who was coordinating tanker supply between Sutlej and Gumma, said, “Our experiment has been successful.”
In Shimla, police personnel distributed mineral water bottles to tourists at the behest of DGP S R Mardi.
Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, who reached Shimla from Delhi, hoped that the situation would “normalise” in one-two days but made a fervent appeal to the citizens and tourists to conserve water and avoid wastage.
Later, at a review meeting, officials informed the Chief Minister that MC Shimla had received 37.63 MLD water, which was distributed.