By Ujwala P and Mikaela Viqueira
New Delhi, Jan 19 (EFE).- At least eight million people living in the Indian capital, New Delhi, face water shortages as the city’s main water source, the River Yamuna, is contaminated with high ammonia levels.
A cocktail of industrial effluents and domestic sewage let into the river has left it smelly, polluted and unfit for human consumption for several years.
But the recent spike in ammonia has disrupted the city’s water treatment plants in recent weeks.
“We are not getting enough water for almost a month now,” Poonam, a resident of Wazirabad in northwest Delhi, who lives less than a kilometer (0.6 mile) from the river, told EFE.
Poonam’s household depends on the government’s water supply system for their daily needs.
The Delhi Jal Board (DJB), responsible for the production and distribution of water to the city, curtailed production in its Wazirabad water treatment plant (WTP) due to high levels of ammonia in the Yamuna, from where it draws raw water for purification.
“Water production has been curtailed 30-50 percent from WTPs of Wazirabad & Chandrawal,” the board said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter) on Jan. 8.
Water supply will be available at low pressure till the situation improves, the statement added.
“We store water in containers whenever it comes,” Poonam said, pointing to buckets of water stored in her house.
While Poonam uses the treated water for household chores, her family buys water for drinking and cooking purposes.
“It costs 20 rupees ($0.24) for 20 liters,” she said.
Sometimes, even the treated water remains muddy, she added.
A source at the Wazirabad treatment plant confirmed to EFE that water production remained curtailed by over 50 percent as of Jan.17 due to the high presence of ammonia in the water.
WTPs use chlorine to neutralize the ammonia present in the water.
But the recent surge in ammonia level requires large quantities of chlorine, which is beyond the plant’s treatable range, local newspaper, The Indian Express, reported.
On Jan. 10, the concentration of ammonia at the Wazirabad WTPs 1 and 2 was 2.9 ppm, the newspaper said, quoting DJB sources.
“At Wazirabad Water Treatment Plant 1, which produces 45 million gallons of water daily, the amount of chlorine needed to treat 1 ppm ammonia is around 97 kg per hour. But the installed capacity is 60 kg per hour,” the Express said.
To treat the recent levels of 2.9 ppm of ammonia, over 250 kg of chlorine is required per hour, it added.
Madhu Anil Kumar, who lives near the Yamuna river bank in Wazirabad, told EFE, “We have struggled a lot to source water.”
While drinking the river water is unthinkable for Kumar, she said her family had also stopped drinking the treated water from the DJB.
“We used to drink this (treated) water previously, but then the kids started falling ill, so their teachers at school told us to drink purified water,” she said, adding, “We buy drinking water now. “
Experts blame the spike in ammonia levels on Delhi’s neighboring state, Haryana, from where the industrial wastes, released into the Yamuna River, flow downstream to the capital.
Manufacturing units in Haryana are the main source of water contamination, environmentalist Susmita Sengupta, of the Centre for Science and Environment, told EFE.
“The rise in the ammonia level is basically due to the pollutants coming from the dyeing industry from Haryana,” she said.
Every industry has a waste treatment plant, but if there is a breakdown in the plant or if the pollutants in the waste exceed a set limit, it remains untreated and is disposed of into the river, Sengupta explained.
“Effluents released by Haryana coupled with non-maintenance of the ecological flow of the river by Haryana are the major reasons behind the rise in ammonia in Delhi,” Delhi’s water minister, Atishi, said in a letter to the state’s chief secretary on Dec. 28.
At least one-fourth of Delhi’s over 30 million population is affected by a reduction in water treatment, the minister said.
While the capital has faced high ammonia levels in the past, the problem lies with the “increasing discharge of partially treated industrial effluent and untreated sewage into the Yamuna in the past decade,” Nature, a leading science journal, reported in an article in February 2022. EFE
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