'18pc of Delhi water unfit for drinking'
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New Delhi: Eighteen per cent of water supplied by the Delhi Jal Board is unfit for drinking and every fifth person in the city is consuming contaminated water, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's Public Health Committee revealed on Thursday.
At a time when 60 per cent of the households in Delhi consume Delhi Jal Board water, it comes as a surprise that 18 per cent of water supplied is polluted as it contained human feces.
This came to light after the MCD's Public Health Committee carried out a test of samples of Jal Board Water. "Consuming contaminated water can cause water-borne diseases like cholera, gastroenteritis, typhoid, jaundice among others. We wanted to find if the water supplied by Delhi Jal Board was drinkable or not and as such 616 samples were lifted from various corners of Delhi. Of these 111 samples were found to contain fecal contamination," Dr. V. K. Mongia, chairman, MCD health committee said.
"The colony count i.e. measurement of the growth of bacteria in a water sample revealed that every 100ml sample of water contained more than 10 bacteria most of them because of fecal contamination. By all standards such water is unfit for for consumption," he said.
The samples were collected between January to February 2011 and were tested by the Public Health Laboratory of MCD.
BJP president Vijender Gupta today asked the government to look into the matter. He also said that it was a criminal offence on the part of the government as no concrete step has been taken yet.
Monga pointed out that the feces from the sewerage mixes with most of the waters that is being supplied in Delhi that led to such contamination. "Water contamination happens because of interrupted water supply, corroded water pipes, mixing of sewer plant pipelines and water pipelines," he said.
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