Drinking Water in Guwahati City: Its Past, Present Status and Associated Problems

Prasanta Bhattacharya,Rajashree Borah

doi:10.20896/saci.v1i3.46

Abstract

Guwahati is one of the fastest growing cities of Northeast India. The haphazard growth of the city has resulted in a chaotic situation, giving rise to circumstances not favourable to its residents in many aspects. Amongst these, drinking water is the most crucial problem confronting the resi-dents. In this paper, an attempt has been made to assess the availability of drinking water over a period of time in the city. In addition, it also attempts to understand the challenges of drinking wa-ter availability at present. Apart from consultation of secondary sources like archival data, local municipality body, primary data has been collected from three selected municipality wards based on their core, periphery and midpoint locations among the 60 wards of the city.

Highlights

Throughout history, civilisations have thrived in regions of abundant availability of water resources
Access to clean and protected drinking water has been treated as a fundamental right for the people in India
There was not any well-planned public supply systems in the cities like Guwahati in the past, prevalence of small water tanks and wells excavated by the Ahom rulers emphasised the public welfare measures taken

Summary

Introduction

Throughout history, civilisations have thrived in regions of abundant availability of water resources. In Assam, availability of drinking water began to hit the people hard more specially in the urban areas due to rapid increase of population and unreliable nature of public water supply in most cities (Ananthakrishnan, 2007; Ghosh Mitra, 2010; Mckenzie and Ray, 2005; 2009; Vishwanath, 2013) including Guwahati, people. Primary data on issues associated with drinking water availability has been generated from three selected wards targeted for the study. These three wards represent the core, the peripheries and the intermediate locations of the city. The primary investigation tries to highlight issues regarding availability of potable water, its proper use and management, as well as identification of problems pertaining to drinking water

Objectives and Methodology

Findings

Conclusion