Ranga Reddy district draws up plan to tackle drinking water scarcity.
According to the data, four mandals registered deficit rainfall while 14 mandals received normal rainfall and four mandals registered excess rainfall.
Open Hyderabad: The Ranga Reddy district administration has drawn up an action plan to meet the drinking water requirements for summer.
Proposals have been sent to the State government requesting sanction of Rs 8.96 crore to ensure adequate water supply to residential colonies along the city suburbs and villages in the district.
District Collector M Raghunandan Rao is scheduled to meet Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao during the district Collector’s conference to be held here on April 10, on issues related to water supply.
Officials have identified 639 villages in 22 mandals as affected and water will be supplied either through tankers or water drawn from hired borewells.
At present, water is being supplied to 75 villages and 32 habitations in the district.
According to the data, four mandals registered deficit rainfall while 14 mandals received normal rainfall and four mandals registered excess rainfall.
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board is supplying water to villages in Maheswaram, Kandukur, Ibrahimpatnam and Shankarpally apart from areas on the city suburbs and colonies that have come up inside the ORR radius.
A senior official said the water board prepared proposals of over Rs 4.65 crore to meet the drinking water needs in villages and colonies in parts of Shamshabad and Rajendranagar areas, Hayathnagar and Saroornagar under the Calamity Relief Fund (CRF).

Water shortage makes life miserable for villagers in Puri, Kalahandi.
In Brahmagiri block of Puri district, locals of as many as 15 different villages allege that in spite of overhead tank for mass water supply installed seven years ago, pipelines to almost all villages and even a solar power back up facility to support water lift during power failures, people are yet to get proper supply of water.
Further, tube wells have also become defunct in the area depriving people of clean drinking water.
“Over the last seven years we had only got water for about two months and that too in poor quality since we found more iron content in it.
Subsequently the project stopped functioning altogether.
Now dependence on local open water bodies is posing health threats like spread of water borne diseases in the area,” a local resident of Bhubanpur village said.
Asked about the situation, local administration promised to solve the water crisis as soon as possible.
“I spoke to the concerned department and they have already initiated work on ad-hoc basis.
I hope the problems would be alleviated within a week, Jitendra Kumar Sahu, Brahmagiri BDO said.
Right from the sunrise locals have to struggle by digging pits on the river bank and collect water.

Calabar residents lament scarcity of pipe borne water.
Related News Some residents of Calabar have expressed worry over the lack of pipe borne water in the city in recent months, saying that they have resorted to boreholes as an alternative.
They called on the Cross River Water Board Limited to restore the supply of pipe borne water in the city without delay.
“It is well over two months that we had pipe borne water last and it is a terrible situation.
Mr. Udoh said most of the residents had now been compelled to fetch water from private boreholes but expressed fears over the safety of water from such a source.
According to Edem Ekpenyong, sinking of private boreholes has become the order of the day in Calabar.
“Calabar has actually changed.
Some people now sink boreholes anyhow in their premises.
“This is not the Calabar that we were used to,” he said.
“Some of the problem we have are natural, but we have started pumping water and very soon the situation will normalise,” he added.

While the authorities in Chandigarh have been making tall claims of making 24X7 water supply from this year, the ground reality is that the city residents will have to grapple with a huge shortfall of water supply.
Even as the administrations of the three cities have taken steps such as banning watering of lawns and washing of vehicles using running water, this is unlikely to be of much help.
Officials in the municipal corporation reveal that at present, Chandigarh is short of 29 million gallons daily (MGD).
The city receives 87 MGD water against a demand of 116 MGD, a shortage of 29 MGD.
“The work on the phases 5 and 6 of the Kajauli waterworks is in progress and we are hopeful that the city will get extra 35 MGD water by the next summer and residents will be getting 24X7 water supply,” said Chandigarh MC commissioner B Purushartha.
The Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA), that looks after water supply in Panchkula, is currently supplying 22-24 MGD water to city.
But as the summer approaches, the consumption will increase to 28-30 MGD in peak summer.
Even if water supply from the Kaushalya dam gets exhausted, we have enough tubewells installed in the city to take care of the rising water demand during summer.
The increase in demand and failure to increase the supply proportionately are the main reasons behind water scarcity.
In SAS Nagar, many sectors are yet to get canal water and most of the water supply is met by tubewells.

Israeli start-up extracting water from air, around the world.
“We created a product that can really be the next source of drinking water,” Maxim Pasik, executive chairman of Rishon Lezion-based Water Gen, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
“[And] what they drink is not healthy.” In India, the memorandum inked between Water Gen and Vikram Solar enables the latter to manufacture and distribute the Israeli company’s products, incorporating solar power to fuel the water generation process in remote locations.
If you have bad pipes it doesn’t matter how much good water you put in the pipes.” The GENius technology works on-demand by trapping the humid air inside the device, then cleaning and drying the air and extracting the now clean water, Pasik said.
“People cannot live without water.” Pasik said that in the future, technologies like Water Gen’s devices will have the capacity to prevent wars and foster peace, in regions where people are fighting for access to clean water.
“It’s very important that this kind of solution comes from Israel,” he said.
“This is kiddush Hashem [sanctification of God’s name] and tikkun olam [repairing the world].” As an investor in sustainable technology solutions, Pasik also serves as executive chairman at a variety of other Israeli and international companies, including the Ramot Hashavim-based Vertical Field and partner Green Wall Israel, which focus on building natural gardens on vertical surfaces.
“The biggest problem in the world is drinking water and the second is pollution,” he said, “We don’t have a place in the city to put trees.” A 1,000-meter vertical field is equivalent to 50 trees, each 15 meters tall, which would take many years to grow, Pasik explained.
While Vertical Field and Green Wall can provide critical solutions to dense urban communities plagued by air pollution, Pasik stressed that solving the world’s water scarcity problem is still his top priority.
“Two-thirds of the world has drinking-water problems,” Pasik said.

PM launches $930m water strategy for Amman and Zarqa.
ZARQA – Prime Minister Hani Mulki on Saturday launched a $930-million strategy to increase households’ connectivity to the wastewater network in Amman and Zarqa, raising it from the current 80 per cent to 90 per cent by the year 2025.
The strategy entails the implementation of 21 projects including the construction of new wastewater treatment plants, the expansion and refurbishment of existing plants, and the installation of new sewage networks.
The Amman and Zarqa wastewater strategy, set to be fully executed in eight years, seeks to increase linkage to the wastewater network, while utilising wastewater as one of the Kingdom’s strategic water resources for constrained cultivations and industry.
Mulki stressed Jordan’s long experience and success in managing water resources due to its water scarcity, noting that the Kingdom now ranks among the world’s best countries in the water management sector.
Mulki commended the sector’s achievements in handling the major water challenges the country faces in light of the increasing demand for water and of the great influx of refugees into the Kingdom.
He noted that Jordan has been categorised among the poorest nations in terms of water availability across the globe.
The strategy, he said, will also help protect surface and underground water resources from pollution, improving the population‘s health and environmental conditions in the two governorates.
A variety of funding mechanisms will help finance the strategy’s 21 projects, according to the ministry, for which funding will come from the Treasury, as well as easy loans and grants from the US, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Germany and Britain.
Nasser noted that some projects were already under way, expressing the government’s appreciation for donor countries’ and agencies’ financial and technical support.

Last month, the Indus River System Authority (Irsa) — the body that decides the formula of water sharing between the four provinces — projected a 35 per cent water shortage for Kharif season.
This season starts from April 1 every year and the demand for water rises for sowing of crops like cotton and rice.
In case of water shortage, the most affected provinces are Punjab and Sindh that are more dependent on Indus water than KP and Balochistan.
Prior to the announcement, Sindh had raised the issue of reduced water availability in Kharif season.
“Water is most useful when it is actually needed and the focus must be on ensuring its supply at that moment.” Khan says a similar situation arises every year between March 20 and April 10 when there is limited rainfall and weather is not hot enough to melt the glaciers.
Sindh, he says, feels more stressed because the crops there mature almost a month earlier than in Punjab because of its much hotter weather.
For the same reason, he says, the crops in Sindh are sowed earlier and therefore it needs more water than Punjab around this time.
“The existing varieties of Bt cotton cannot afford stress, caused by the scarcity of water during the start of the cropping cycle.
He says if there is no consensus on building of large dams, several small reservoirs can be made by different provinces according to their own water demands.
“The provinces with higher demand can have more reservoirs than those with lesser demand.” He laments the research budget for agriculture sector remains unused.

No, We Can’t Turn Water Into Wine.
But How About Seawater Into Drinking Water?.
Scientists have discovered a new way to get drinkable water to those who need it most.
In research published in the Nature Nanotechnology journal, a group of scientists from the U.K. detail how they created a membrane ‘sieve’ out of graphene – an ultra-thin sheet of carbon atoms – that was able to remove salt from seawater and render it potable.
They say this desalination process – which they accomplished by manipulating the size of the pores in the membranes to allow common salts to filter through the material – could make way for more affordable water filtration systems in the developing world.
"Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology," said Rahul Nair, professor of material physics at the University of Manchester.
This is the first time scientists have managed to remove common salts using the graphene filtering process.
"This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime.
The United Nations has predicted that by 2025, 14 percent of the world’s population will be faced with water scarcity thanks to climate change.
h/t CNBC

Let’s Share Torsa Water, Not Teesta Water: Mamata to Sheikh Hasina.
New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Saturday met Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and offered to share water from the smaller Torsa river instead of Teesta river water.
"The fact is there is no water in Teesta.
Due to water scarcity the NTPC power plant has been closed.
During the meet Mamata is learnt to have stressed upon the fact that West Bengal needs water for irrigation and drinking purposes and pointed out that during the summer Teesta becomes almost becomes dry.
About 113 km of the river is in China and 145 km in Bhutan.
In West Bengal, Torsa flows through the tea estate of Dalsingpara (in Jalpaiguri) and the Jaldapara National Park (Alipurduar District).
Mamata has always expressed her unwillingness to share Teesta water with Bangladesh.
During lean season from April to June the average flow dips to 6 BCM in the low lying areas of North Bengal and Bangladesh.
This makes a 50:50 water-sharin ratio difficult to maintain for Bengal.

Many rivers and lakes dry up, with water-rationing becoming the norm.
The United Nations projects that by 2025, some 14 per cent of the world’s population will face water shortages.
Meanwhile, much of the water on earth is saline.
Wealthy nations are investing in desalination technologies to utilise this commodity.
Researchers in Britain have come up with an efficient sieve that separates salt and water molecules.
The sieve has controlled spacing of pores which do a greater job of filtration than current desalination plants do, as these use polymer-based membranes.
Durability of the membranes while interacting with sea water, and eventual production of the equipment on an industrial scale, are yet to be worked on.
Recently, Israel has been desalinating water pumped from the Mediterranean Sea to supply to more than 1.5 million nationals.
Over half of Israel’s water is sourced directly from the sea, transforming the desert country into a fertile land.
This is not to say that there are no constraints to food security.