That water is a precious and increasingly scarce resource is something that New Delhi knows very well. When summer arrives and temperatures rise in the city, most parts of the capital of the second most populous country in the world still has only four hours of water readily available at the tap everyday.

The rest of the time, people use the water tanks that are installed in all buildings. In reality, those precious four hours are often reduced to two and the tanks are half empty. So, municipal trucks move around through the city with water to fill tanks in an emergency. People end up often paying twice as much as they would if they had running water at home.

Ever since New Delhi could remember, the main source of city water has always been the Yamuna river, a major tributary of the sacred Ganges. According to ancient Vedic scriptures, this river changed its course more than once by the will of the gods.

Today, Yamuna is one of the most polluted rivers in India. Through the polluted waters of this river at Wazirabad on the outskirts of New Delhi, one can easily spot bubbles of fetid gas emanating from rotting sewage. Half-a-billion US dollars have been spent on cleaning up the river Yamuna, but it has just become worse. Yamuna is of critical importance to New Delhi but 90% of city water, coming from this river, is seriously treated.

There is, however, a bigger mystery than why Yamuna has remained heavily polluted in spite of massive spending on its clean-up. There is the mystery of where 13 million cubic meters of water go everyday – because of the 30 million cubic meters distributed daily by the city, only 17 million reach the end consumers. The answer is even sadder than the sordid condition of the river itself: up to 40% of the city’s water supply is lost in leaks and seepage along the 8,900 kilometers of water pipeline that the city government runs.

At the current rate of water consumption in the city, New Delhi reserves will run out by 2015.

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Via Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan/ The Gaea News