The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) supplies 1,369 million litres of drinking water to roughly 72 lakh citizens daily. Meanwhile, every day, the municipal corporation receives 1,739 million litres of sewage at its treatment plants. Result? Ahmedabad residents draw 370 million litres of extra water from the ground every day.
Is your residential society too mixing groundwater with municipal water in its sump? Then you better brace yourself. A result from sample tests in as many as 33 villages that surround the city shows that the groundwater is toxic and unfit for use.
The Gujarat Water Supply and Sewerage Board (GWSSB) has sent out warnings to all the 33 villages to stop drawing water from their borewells.
Water samples for the test were collected in July. All the samples were tested for 15 parameters—including total dissolved salts, hardness, chloride, nitrate, fluoride, alkalinity, and pH levels—and were found unfit for consumption.
Prafull Mehta, a farmer, had filed an RTI query on the groundwater status report.
This comes just weeks after the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) decided to take up 81 government-owned lakes in the city to boost the groundwater level. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel allocated the lakes to the civic body.
In Kumarkhan village, fluoride and sulphate levels were detected to be 2.26 milligram per litre (mg/l) and 681 mg/l far above the permissible limits are 1.5 mg/l and 400 mg/l. Similarly, water samples from Abasana village were found to consist of high total dissolved salts, at 8,094 mg/l, while the permissible limit is 2,000 mg/l. The level of chloride in the groundwater in this village was 4,868 mg/l while the safe limit is 1,000 mg/l.
Also Read: Gujarat’s Ahmedabad City To Get Its Second Expansion; Nandoli Added
