With Mumbai staring down a water crisis and its reservoir stocks depleting by the day, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is drawing up a sweeping overhaul of the city's potable water tanker system.
Under the new policy, BMC is introducing OTP-based bookings and a real-time digital monitoring portal to crack down on unauthorised water extraction, The Indian Express reported.
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The revised policy, currently a work in progress within the BMC's hydraulic department, is designed to close loopholes in the existing challan-based system, under which tankers, once issued a permit, can make multiple trips to civic water filling points and extract water far beyond what they are authorised to procure.
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"With the new policy, we seek to address the present gaps by introducing a system of online approvals for procurement of water tankers by societies and others availing the system. Once the permission is issued, an OTP will be sent to the customer on the basis of which tankers will be allowed to extract water from the water filling points," a senior BMC official told The Indian Express.
The civic body controls 33 potable water filling points across Mumbai, which supply water to its own fleet of tankers as well as over 200 licensed private tankers authorised to carry potable water.
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A digital dashboard, modelled on the BMC's existing desilting dashboard, is also being planned to monitor approvals and track water extraction in real time. The draft policy is expected to be presented before municipal commissioner Ashwini Bhide.
The urgency behind the move is hard to overstate. Mumbai is currently under a 10% water cut as lake levels fall, and the IMD's revised monsoon forecast, pegged at 90% of the long-period average, has raised the prospect of below-average rainfall over the lake catchment area this season.
Compounding the crisis, the Mumbai Water Tanker Association, whose members supply between 200 million litres and 2,000 million litres of non-potable water daily to residential, industrial and commercial units, launched an indefinite strike from Monday, further tightening the city's already strained water supply chain.
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