Your drinking water used at city’s construction sites

MUMBAI: Even as the city grapples with a water shortage, precious drinking water meant for housing societies and slums is being sold illegally and used to construct buildings, thanks to a nexus between civic officials, builders and tanker owners.

Mumbai has 18 water filling stations from where potable water is carried in tankers to buildings and slums that don’t get water from taps, owing to problems in the supply lines.

Every day, these tankers distribute about seven million litres of drinking water, which is sold at a nominal rate of Rs 120 to Rs 150 a tanker to housing societies and given free to slum dwellers in areas where the local corporator has allotted money from his area development fund. Each tanker carries about 10,000 liters of water.

Under the rules, water from these filling stations is meant exclusively for drinking. However, the problem is that the BMC has no system in place to check where the tankers actually take this water. Civic activists say that in many cases, it is supplied to construction sites and other businesses. Over the past week, drinking water from a filling station at Andheri (E), near the railway station, has been distributed to several construction sites.

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