How much water does your city actually have left?

Indian cities receive substantial monsoon rain, yet many still face falling groundwater levels and recurring water shortages. In today's 'YOUR INDIA' column, Santosh Nair looks at Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad to ask why urban water systems are under growing pressure.

In the summer of recent years, Bengaluru residents have paid private tankers several thousand rupees for a single load of water, in a city that once had more than 260 lakes. Today, fewer than half that number, somewhere between 80 and 81 lakes, still hold water at all. Thousands of borewells across the city have simply gone dry.

Mumbai, a city built on an island surrounded by the sea, has faced years where its own reservoirs, the source of nearly all its drinking water, dropped to between 9 and 10 per cent of total capacity, enough for barely a month if rains delayed further. Delhi and its wider region depend partly on groundwater that is now officially classified as critical in 21 separate zones, serving a population of roughly 3.3 crore people. Hyderabad’s groundwater situation is, by official assessment, the most distressed of any major Indian city, with 26 administrative divisions rated over-exploited or critical.

At least 21 major Indian cities now show dangerously low groundwater levels, according to assessments drawing on NITI Aayog’s Composite Water Management Index and the Jal Shakti Ministry’s own groundwater data. This is not a warning about some future decade. It is a description of several Indian........

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