Thirsty Vizag, Act Now - World Environment Day

Sunday, 06 June 2010 06:14

Written by Special Correspondent

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Vizag: Today Samata, an NGO initiated a petition campaign called ‘Thirsty Vizag, Act Now’ to address the water crisis being faced by the citizens of Vizag.

The campaign was formally inaugurated by the Executive Director of Samata Mr. Ravi Rebbapragada on the occasion of World Environment Day. Volunteers from Samata will be visiting the residential communities, slums, malls, Rythu bazaars for the next one week and campaign through skits and street plays to get the declaration signed by the citizens.

The signed petition will be forwarded to the officers of the concerned authorities, political representatives of the State and Visakhapatnam district.

Background
Visakhapatnam is facing a terrible water crisis. With rapid industrialisation and increasing population there is an ever increasing demand for water.

According to the GVMC City Development Plan, 2006, the current demand for water is 87 MGD (million gallons per day). Where as the current installed capacity of water sources is only 40.25 MGD. With this comes a huge deficit of 46.75 MGD between demand and supply which is likely to widen drastically in future.

The recommended per capita consumption of water is 150 to 200 Lpcd (Litres per capita per day) for all residences, but the supply is fairly low at 75 lpcd. In spite of this around 16 MGD of water is supplied to the industries from the fresh water sources. Viwsco currently supplies 34 million gallon per day (mgd) of water to Vizag Steel, 7 mgd to NTPC- Simhadri power plant and 1.5 mgd to the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation. And in the future they will be using more water from the city’s fresh water supply. As per the reply to an RTI filed with the GVMC, 18 MGD of water is proposed to be supplied to aluminium industries from major sources of fresh water for Vizag.

The petition declares:
“We the citizens of Vishakhapatnam declare that water is a community resource and no source of water can be handed over to any person or corporate entity for industrial use without regard to the needs of the people. It is the duty of the government to protect and conserve water resources and use them in a sustainable manner. The government must be accountable to the community when doing anything that affects this resource. We demand that the government’s first charge should be to fulfil the needs of the domestic and agricultural sector before they plan for any diversion of fresh water for any industrial usage. The community’s right to access water for domestic and agricultural use must be protected.”