Visakhapatnam: Visakhapatnam is heading for a water crisis this summer owing to the rapid ground water depletion and the plummeting levels in reservoirs. Water flow from household borewells is also thinning, residents having to dig deeper to strike water. The groundwater level has fallen to 7.77 m as of Friday against the 6.95 m in March of 2015.
K. Madhusudana Rao, a resident of Madhurawada and the owner of a borewell company, told this correspondent that water was earlier available at a depth of 100 feet in most parts of the city.
“But now digging up to 150-200 feet has become a norm. When we constructed our house in 2000, we plumbed a borewell only up to 70 feet in depth. Declining duration of water supply from the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) has been putting additional stress on borewells in various parts of the city” he said.
Prof. N. Subbarao of the geology department of Andhra University said that decreased rainfall in 2015, exploitation of water resources and increased construction activity had multiplied the district’s water woes.
“Encouraging water harvesting and using treated water for non-drinking purposes can help a lot,” Prof. Subba Rao said.
Several public bore-wells, dug by the GVMC, have become defunct, with groundwater slipping further down. GVMC superintending engineer (WS) P. Ananda Rao said that they plan-ned to dig about 250 new borewells in the city besi-des repairing the existing ones with a budget of '2 crore. The GVMC has also planned to flush the existing borewells for best yield as part of its summer action plan.
The civic body has done much to spread the word on water harvesting, but many houses still do not have water harvesting pits.
