Amid Diwali celebrations, poor supply of drinking water to many parts of Haldwani has been adversely hitting normal life of the town. According to the residents, things keep continuing this way for many days. While drinking water supply to Haldwani's Mandi area remains disrupted for over a fortnight, tube-wells catering to huge population of Judge Farm area of Haldwani also became nearly dysfunctional a couple of days ago.
The crippled supply is leaving an adverse impact on the basic services of the area when the people are gearing up for the festivities. The matter of concern is that a day hardly passes when one part of Haldwani city or the other does not face drinking water woes, despite Haldwani having adequate sources of drinking water.
Unlike many other areas, Haldwani region has plenty of drinking water in store. According to the official concerned of the Jal Sansthan, Haldwani, while availability of the drinking water in Haldwani remains about 35 million liter per day (MlD), the demand for the same is only around 28 (MlD) even during the peak hours, thus showing about seven MlD drinking water in the surplus.
Besides, the Jal Sansthan has also installed tube-wells in many parts of urban as well as rural parts of Haldwani. Yet, the drinking water crisis continues hitting normal life for long.
This is mainly because of delay in replacing over four/ five decade- old drinking water distribution system of the Haldwani region and poor storage capacity.
More so, excessive dependence on tube wells only aggravates the drinking water crisis as once a tube well becomes non-functioning it takes more than a fortnight to put it back on the rails, as the officials concerned maintain.
Though the officials concerned have expressed hope for early restoration of the drinking water supply to these areas, patience of citizens of the affected areas seems to be wearing thin each passing day. 'Indifferent' attitude of the public representatives of the Haldwani Assembly constituency as the affected citizens alleged has compounded on their woes.
Daily unscheduled power cuts coupled with low voltage has added to the woes of the people of the region which is dependent on power- driven drinking water distribution system like tube-wells to a great extent.