Revamped Dwarka lake opened by Kejriwal
The Delhi government is running an initiative to rejuvenate the city’s lakes, with an aim to develop 26 lakes and 380 water bodies to augment the Capital’s constrained water supply capacity.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday inspected the newly-rejuvenated Pappankalan lake at Dwarka’s Sector 16 and said the Delhi government will turn the Capital into a city of lakes.
The Delhi government is running an initiative to rejuvenate the city’s lakes, with an aim to develop 26 lakes and 380 water bodies to augment the Capital’s constrained water supply capacity. Kejriwal has been personally monitoring this initiative, and this inspection was part of it.
“There is a shortage of drinking water in Delhi. While we have been trying to convince our neighbouring states to supply us with more water, we are also doing our best to maximise Delhi’s potential to produce water on its own. The government is working on recharging and recycling water to make the state self-sufficient to an extent. With modernisation and globalisation, many countries have worked on various technologies to recycle wastewater,” Kejriwal said.
“The government will now take up quality landscaping on the site and encourage locals to adopt it as a public recreational site like a park,” the CM said.
The government also claimed that due to the rejuvenated Pappankalan lake, the groundwater within a radius of half a kilometre has risen by 6.25 metres. To be sure, only three out of 34 tehsils in the city are within safe limits as far as groundwater is concerned, according to the latest annual report by the Central Groundwater Board (CGWB), which also indicates that Delhi’s groundwater table is gradually on the rise.
Ankit Srivastav, consultant (water bodies) at Delhi Jal Board, said the 6.25m increase in the groundwater table in the area around the lake, as claimed by the government, is “unusual”.
“Before the artificial lake rejuvenation plan kicked off in 2022, the ground water table was at 20m, now it is at 13.8m. In the next one year 24 more lakes would be rejuvenated in different parts of the capital which will together lead to huge jump in ground water resources in Delhi,” said Srivastav.
Diwan Singh, environmental activist who organised the Yamuna Satyagrah for rejuvenating the river and other water bodies in the city, said the government will have to create publicly verifiable ways to ensure that highest grade of treated water is being put for ground water recharge to ensure that sub surface aquifers are not contaminated. “Water for human consumption will be purified by RO plants, but in the first stage, it is equally important to ensure that water which is as pure as rainwater is being fed for ground water recharge. Otherwise it will turn into an ecological disaster,” he said.
