New Delhi - Ranbir Singh still remembers when the wells in his village on New Delhi's southwestern edge were filled with sweet-tasting water and livestock drank from the small ponds that dotted the area.
Now the village has been all but subsumed by Dwarka, a high-rise satellite city that sprang up in the 1990s on the edge of India's sprawling capital.
The ponds dried out long ago and are now filled with rubbish, while over-extraction has caused the groundwater level to fall so far that industrial pumps are needed to bring water to the surface.
"Today what you get from underground is not even drinkable," the 62-year-old told AFP in Pochanpur, now a hodgepodge of small-scale construction overshadowed by Dwarka's tower blocks.
"People who still consume it complain of stomach problems, and many young people in our village suffer from skin problems because of this water."
Decades of population growth and uncontrolled urbanisation have created a water crisis in India.
The World Resources Institute, a Washington-based research group, says the national supply is predicted to fall to 50 percent below demand by 2030.
A new UN report to be launched in Delhi on Friday ahead of World Water Day on March 22 will warn of an urgent need to manage the world's water more sustainably and highlight the problem of groundwater over-extraction, particularly in India and China.
It says 20 percent of global groundwater sources are already over-exploited and warns the problem will only become more acute without better management, with demand expected to rise by 55 percent by 2050.
AFP
