The demand for water tankers has gone up by at least one-and-a-half times in the last seven to 10 days as the city endures a relentless heat assault, a senior official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said.
The surge in demand for water and the resultant scarcity is being felt in pockets across the city as Kolkatans struggle to grapple with the heat.
Areas dependent on underground water are the worst-hit as the water level has gone down in the absence of rain.
The KMC official said large areas of east and southeast Kolkata are dependent on groundwater. Apart from those pockets, the areas in the city where the pressure of water in the supply line is low are also reeling from a crisis.
“We have seen that the demand for water tankers has gone up by at least one-and-a-half times in the past seven to 10 days,” the official said.
“The demand for water goes up every summer as people bathe more than once a day. Our target is to keep water supply uninterrupted and fix any problem in supply as quickly as possible,” said the official.
Water tankers are mostly sent to slums since the volume of water supplied falls short of the demand. “Most slums have only one or two sources of water and the volume of supply is hardly enough for the residents there. We have to send tankers to the slums,” another official said.
At the peak of summer, some apartment blocks and housing complexes, too, need water tankers.
A resident of P Majumdar Road in Kasba said an apartment block in their neighbourhood needed two tankers in the last four days to fill their reservoir.
“The reservoir was not filling up. As a result, all the flats were running short of water,” said the resident.
A KMC engineer said a number of large housing complexes use underground water to meet the needs of their residents. “The underground water table has gone down because of the heat and the absence of rain for long. As a result, areas and apartments dependent on groundwater are facing a shortage. Water tankers have to be sent to these places as well,” the engineer said.
Large parts of Kasba, Jadavpur, Behala, Tiljala and Topsia, and areas on both sides of EM Bypass, to the south of Ruby, depend on underground water. The KMC is sending water tankers to these neighbourhoods.
“Water tankers are also being sent to pockets where the water pressure is very low, such as DC Dey Road, parts of Tangra, Palmer Bazar, Beleghata, Munshi Bazar, South Sealdah, Dhapa and parts of Maniktala,” the engineer said.
Rampant wastage of water is partly responsible for the water scarcity, KMC officials said. The production of potable water has increased from 285 million gallons a day to 510 million gallons in the past decade. Yet the supply falls short of the demand during the summer.