Safer summer in Shimla this time

It is an image that no one will forget in a hurry: frustrated residents of Shimla urging tourists, through social media, not to visit the famous hill station. The requests were made last summer because there was not just enough water to go around. “It was the first time in my 20 years here that my neighbourhood went without water for 15 days at a stretch,” says Om Prakash Bhuraita, a director at the State Resource Centre in Shimla.

Thousands of locals came forward to protest, including at one midnight agitation, recalls Bhuraita. The crisis was attributed to several reasons. “The situation deteriorated last year because of very poor snowfall in the catchment of water sources. Also, there was a long dry spell between February and May. Water supply schemes draw water directly from the streams,” says Dharmendra Gill, MD of Shimla Jal Prabandhan Nigam (SJPNL), the unified agency set up by the Himachal government last year to manage Shimla’s water supply and waste water management. The project has received Rs 770 crore as financial assistance from the World Bank.

The erstwhile summer capital of the British today has about 2.05 lakh residents, with another 55,000-60,000 people being added during peak tourist season. SJPNL says it produces about 48 million litres of water daily, after taking into account leaks and a weak hydraulic design. Last summer, when the surface water flow reduced to below 20 million litres a day, water production dipped proportionately, as supply is dependent on the surface flows in springs.

Former deputy mayor Tikender Pawar puts the shortage down to a management issue. “Water has been a problem in Shimla since the time of the British. Last year, it erupted into a crisis because of mismanagement. All the officers were new and unfamiliar with what to do,” says Pawar. But this summer, things should be looking up, with better precipitation last winter raising hopes of replenishing water sources.

Gill says a raft of measures have been undertaken to improve supply, including replacing pipelines, reducing leaks and construction of storage tanks for better distribution. In the long term, a project to draw water from the Kol Dam is expected to improve water security in the hill town.

However, Manshi Asher, a researcher with the Himdhara Collective, says the government needs to look at water conservation more holistically. “As an organisation, we have been saying we can’t have the kind of urbanisation in the hills that we see in the plains. Currently, urbanisation is not taking into account ecological and geological factors,” she says. Solutions, she says, have to be linked to the different layers of conservation and cannot rely on technical solutions alone.