Residents of the picturesque Indian hill station Shimla are begging tourists to stay away amid a severe drinking water shortage that is being compared to Cape Town’s water crisis.
The Himalayan city was the former summer capital of the British Raj and continues to be popular with Indians fleeing scorching summers on the Gangetic plain. Water supplies have been critically low for at least the past three years but ran out completely on 20 May.
The shortage has forced the city’s 172,000 residents to line up for hours each day to collect water from tankers supplied by the government, to drink bottled water or to pay steep prices to the “tanker mafia” – private suppliers accused of siphoning water from the public supply.
At the height of its tourist season in June, when the population swells by another 100,000 people and visitors can reach up to 30,000 each day, the city needs about 45m litres of water daily. On Tuesday and Wednesday it had about 18m and 22m litres available respectively, officials said.
Hotels have been cancelling bookings and locals are using social media to ask tourists to stay away until supplies recover. “A plea to everyone who loves mountains, it’s about time all of you stop visiting Shimla for a while,” one resident, Abhinav Chandel, wrote on Instagram.
“The residents are barely getting water to drink, and at a few places, sewage water is being supplied to the houses.”
Dozens of police officers have been deployed to guard water-distribution sites and protests have broken out across the town as the city nears almost two weeks without regular supplies.
Construction activity has been banned and on Tuesday car washes were prevented from operating for a week.
The Himachal Pradesh chief minister, Jai Ram Thakur, has blamed the crisis on lower than expected snowfall that caused rivers and streams to dry. Others have blamed chronic mismanagement.
The town should receive about 70m litres per day, but about 40% is lost to leakages during the pumping and distribution phases, according to estimates by Tikender Panwar, the city’s former deputy mayor.
One of the five major water sources for the Ashwani Khad rivulet is also believed to have become contaminated in recent years, further reducing the supply.
Panwar also blamed climate change, which he said had resulted in more rain but in shorter, heavier bursts. “The rain comes in torrents, so the water doesn’t get retained below the surface,” he said.
Cape Town in South Africa narrowly averted exhausting its water supplyearlier this year due to intensive conservation efforts. But several Indian cities face a similar prospect with stocks at about 29% of total capacity, the lowest in a decade, according to the country’s central water commission.
Around 600 million Indians are experiencing high water stress, according to the World Resources Institute. Major cities such as Delhi and Bangalore have faced disruptions to supplies in recent years.
In 2016, tensions between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu state over how to share supplies from a major river erupted into riots.
Many of those who do have water find their supply is tainted. A World Bank study estimated that about 163 million Indians had no access to safe drinking water and that 21% of communicable diseases in the country were linked to polluted supplies. The most common is diarrhoea, which kills about 500 Indian children under five every day.
In part, the problem is the population: India has about 17% of the world’s people but just 4% of freshwater resources. But analysts also blame poor management by state and federal governments, corruption, the endemic pollution of existing water sources, as well as a reliance on inefficient crops and farming methods by the agriculture sector, which uses 90% of the country’s water supply.