Telangana: Free groundwater? Not anymore! Tariff rollout to save dipping table

HYDERABAD: Barring small domestic users, groundwater will no longer be available for free to others in Telangana any more. This, with the state government recently issuing an order making it mandatory for all packaged drinking water supply units, bulk suppliers, large housing societies and private tankers to cough up a fee to extract ground water. So far, these users have not had to pay a single rupee to the government.
Going forward this will change and these units will be metered and charged as per their use. The only exemption: Users drawing up to 25 cubic metres (one cubic meter is equal to 1,000 litres). Officials said, the new tariffs will be rolled out by end of June or early July. As per that, residential apartments and housing societies extracting anything from 26 to 50 cubic metres will have to pay a fee of 1 per litre. For more than 50 cubic meters, this amount will be 2 per litre.
In case of packaged drinking water units the fee will be 1 for up to 50 cubic meters and increase consistently as per usage. For those drawing 5,000 cubic meters and above, a fee of 10 per litre will be levied by the groundwater department. According the guidelines, the user charges will be collected based on different categories like semi-critical and critical drinking water units - depending on availability of groundwater sources - and the charges will range between 2 and 60 per litre.
Even private units supplying groundwater through tankers to their consumers in bulk quantities have to pay 10, 20, 25 per litre, depending on the tanker capacity.
"Till now, the Telangana government was implementing the Water, Tree and Land Act (WALTA). But here on, user charges will be collected as per new policy on groundwater extraction," a senior official of the department said adding that these tariffs have been fixed as per the recommendations of the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA). Accordingly, the Telangana government formulated a policy - Telangana State Ground Water Extractions Rule-2023 - and issued gazette notification (dated June 2) implementing the new charges.
Except for 12 states, including Telangana, the remaining have been following the CWGA police since 2020.
"The new guidelines will prove to be beneficial as groundwater levels across Greater Hyderabad and rest of Telangana, have been declining rapidly," the official said adding how it will also curb the mushrooming of illegal packaged drinking water units. Though there's no official data, turns out every mandal in the state has at least 1,000 to 1,200 units that are illegally extracting groundwater and earning lakhs of rupees by selling it.
"Now, all these units have to fix smart metres and pay user charges," the official said. As per the new policy, installation of tamper-proof digital water flow meters with telemetry at a common outlet point is mandatory, to measure groundwater extraction.