BLOG
August 8th, 2020
Via The Hindustan Times, a report on Mumbai’s water crisis:
The seven lakes that supply water to Mumbai have shown slight increase in water stock as water level reached 37.36% on Wednesday morning, up from 34.95% useful water content on Tuesday morning. The water level in the lakes was 89.96% this time last year. The current water stock is sufficient to supply water to Mumbai for a little over 100 days.
Owing to the heavy rainfall since the past two days, Vihar lake situated inside Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) overflowed at 10pm on Wednesday, according to the civic body.
Vihar lake, with a capacity of 27,698 million litre, is the second lake to overflow in the city. Earlier, Tulsi lake, also situated in SGNP, had overflowed on July 28. However, Vihar and Tulsi lakes do not have significant contribution towards drinking water supply to Mumbai.
Starting Wednesday, Mumbai has imposed 20% water cut in the city owing to meagre rainfall in catchment areas.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday morning, rainfall added 33,411 million litre (ML) water to the seven lakes, taking the total the water content to 539,307ML on Wednesday. However, this is much less compared to the stock this time last year when there was 1,301,984 ML water in the seven lakes. In 2018, the water level was 1,2,18,692 ML.
About two weeks ago, on July 21, the water stock in the lakes was at 28%.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) supplies 3,850 million litre water per day (MLD) to Mumbai as opposed to a demand of 4,200MLD. After the 20% water cut, BMC will supply 3,080MLD water to Mumbai, according to information from BMC.
In the past 24 hours, Upper Vaitarna received 97mm rainfall, Modak Sagar received 141mm rainfall, Tansa received 83mm rainfall, Middle Vaitarna received 99mm rainfall, Bhatsa received 88mm rainfall, Vihar received 105mm rainfall, and Tulsi 154mm rainfall.
The seven lakes are bifurcated into two systems — the Vaitarna system which supplies to the western suburbs and the island city and the Bhatsa system which supplies to the eastern suburbs. The lakes are situated in Mumbai, Thane and Palghar districts.