“Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,”

“Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,”

Mrs. Sharma, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water. It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Sharma will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives.this is the usual morning of many Delhi households.

In Delhi Yamuna enters still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water. As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day. The river becomes a noxious black thread. Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface. Their predicament testifies to the government’s astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power. 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations. The government says that 9 out of 10 Indians have access to the public water supply, but that may include sources that are going dry or are contaminated.

Carrying the capital’s waste on its back, the Yamuna meanders south to cities like Mathura and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. It is their principal source of drinking water, too. New Delhi’s downstream neighbors are forced to treat the water heavily, hiking up the cost. This river is worshiped,” . “Is this the right way of worshiping it? If you want to worship the river, you should give it more respect, You should treat it the right way. You should question the government. You should ask the state to actually do something for the river.”