Delhi water policy under AAP attack

Alleging collusion with private companies, Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, today hit out at the Delhi government for its claim that 50 per cent of the water it supplies through the Delhi Jal Board are lost in leakage and hence, were non-revenue water.

Kejriwal “revealed” data on how a treatment plant run by French company Degremont, with a capacity of 90 million gallons a day, treated twice that amount. He showed UP government’s documents that show the Ganges water it supplied to the Sonia Vihar treatment plant, run by Degremont, was almost half of what was actually shown to be treated. “It is a miraculous plant which when fed 90 million gallons of untreated water produces 137 million gallons of treated water,” kejriwal said.

“The trick was to show large quantities of treated water and then dismiss half of it as non-revenue water. It was on the basis of the large quantities of leakage in water that private companies were given contracts to run treatment plants,” he said.

“Of the 840 million gallons water supplied in Delhi, half of it was shown as non-revenue water, and the Delhi blames leakage for this,” he added.

If 210 million gallons were to flow on the roads of Delhi daily, the capital would be flooded all year. But we don't see any of it, he said.

A new contract has been signed with a company in Malviya nagar for Rs 529 crore for 32,000 connections. If this were to get operational each consumer would be paying a monthly bill of Rs 1,500 just toward the interest to the huge project cost he says.

Delhi government he said was planning to sign contracts with different companies all over Delhi for a total cost of Rs 5000 crore.