Guwahati’s Drinking Water 

Guwahati, the fastest growing city in the Northeast, is facing a serious problem — availability of drinking water, or the lack of it. That Guwahati has never been a city fit for living was first pointed out by the British as early as in the 1850s. While the famous ‘Report on The Province of Assam’, compiled by AJ Moffat Mills, Sudder Judge of the British administration in that decade had given a vivid description of the air and water quality of Guwahati, it had also documented how irresponsible its residents were. In fact, it was primarily on the basis of this report that the British had shifted the headquarters of Assam administration from Guwahati to Shillong. More than 150 years later here is a report released by the Union Minister for Consumer Affairs Ram Vilas Paswan which says that tap water in Guwahati is unfit for drinking. Thankfully, Guwahati is not the lone city or State capital to have earned such a notorious distinction. Going by the report, there are twenty more such cities across the country where tap water — i.e., water supplied by the municipality or various government agencies, too are undrinkable. This list of 20 cities also includes as many as 13 State capitals. These State capitals are Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram, Patna, Bhopal, Guwahati, Bengaluru, Gandhi Nagar, Lucknow, Jammu, Jaipur, Dehradun, Chennai and Kolkata, with the report saying tap water samples collected from various parts of these cities did not comply with the requirements of the Indian Standard. While the Minister has written to the State governments concerned asking them to clarify what help the Central government can provide to make tap water drinkable, he has also emphasized that citizens should get pure water from the tap and there should be no water that causes diseases. However, what Union minister Paswan probably is not aware of is that more than half the citizens of Guwahati do not get piped water at all. While the old and ageing water supply mechanism of Guwahati Municipal Corporation hardly covers about 10 percent of the citizens, and the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department probably covers another 10 percent, the remaining 70 to 80 percent of citizens have been drinking water drawn from all kinds of unsafe, unhygienic and dangerous sources. Fluoride and arsenic content is present in the ground water drawn by residents in several parts of Guwahati, while unscrupulous private suppliers who allegedly have a nexus with the GMC and PHED authorities have been not only pumping out ground water without any permission, but are also allegedly selling water drawn from open sources. And, above all, the ambitious Rs 1,450-crore water supply project funded by JICA, the Japan government agency, has not only missed several deadlines, but is now said to be heading towards uncertainty. Unsafe drinking water has been already identified as a major public health problem. A recent study had said that drinking water is a major problem all over Assam. People of as many as 18 districts of Assam are even otherwise prone to several water–borne diseases. Studies have revealed that at least 6,881 locations in Assam have water which is contaminated by arsenic, and there are 930 locations showing the presence of fluoride in drinking water. While excess fluoride in water can lead to dental and skeletal fluorosis, arsenic is known to cause cancer. What the Union minister has probably not been told, and what the report has missed is the fact that Guwahati is also one leading city in the country which does not have a sewerage treatment mechanism, and that the sewerage is simply let out into the ground, only to send back numerous kinds of germs back with the ground water that citizens draw. All that the citizens can now probably pray is that the Chief Minister, who often speaks about a pollution-free Assam, finds some time out from his busy schedule of attending various festivals and religious places, and look into what Union minister Paswan has said.