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HomeIndiaGovernanceOverlooked in Shimla's water crisis — the effect on personal hygiene

Overlooked in Shimla’s water crisis — the effect on personal hygiene

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As the city grapples with its worst ever water crisis, hygiene issues have led to fears of illness, infection.

New Delhi: In the last seven days, not a drop of water has fallen from the taps in Ajay Khurana’s house. As a result, says the 54-year-old resident of Kasumpti, a suburb of Shimla, his family’s daily routine has altered considerably.

For one, Khurana tells ThePrint, they now take a bath with half a bucket of water each. A designated bottle of water is also set aside to wet toothbrushes, and in the week since water supply was suddenly cut off, he has discouraged his wife and two children from washing their hair.

“Finally my daughter said ‘please papa let me take a bath!’ She didn’t have a bath yesterday (Saturday), so I said okay take a bath. If you can avoid it (under these circumstances) then you should,” says Khurana, an English professor at a government college in Solan.

A multitude of factors, including a spike in tourism, urbanisation, upcoming hydropower projects, industrialisation, mining and climatic change, had caused the water supply in Shimla to fall from 45 million litres per day (MLD) to 22 MLD last week — nearly half of its requirement.

As the hill town grapples with its worst ever water crisis, the media coverage surrounding its struggles has overlooked a vital aspect of the tragedy — the effect on personal hygiene.

Housekeeping woes

For Shimla’s residents, the permeating uses of water in daily life only became obvious when they no longer had access to it. Khurana says his family has started eating on paper plates to save on water spent washing utensils. Sandwiches and bread-based meals have been incorporated into the daily breakfast, because, Khurana explains, “we have started to look for things to cook where less water is used”.

The professor, however, is one of the lucky ones. He is thankful that he still had a fourth of a tanker left when the crisis hit, and says that “for those who don’t have this kind of storage, it must be really impossible”.

That is those like Jyoti Bhardwaj, 49, a homemaker and a fellow resident of Kasumpti.

On Sunday, her locality was supposed to be the first in the area to receive water supply as per a timetable formulated by the municipal corporation. “We received an assurance of getting it in the morning, but there has not been a drop since,” she says.

Bhardwaj, who lives with her son, has stopped using her washing machine; she and her domestic help have been restricted to recycling soapy water to handwash clothes. Food is cooked once for two days, so that “water is saved on washing utensils like pressure cookers”. They too bathe with half a bucket of water and flush the toilet less often.

Conditions for larger families and the less fortunate in Shimla have become so bad that people have begun to fear the spread of illness and infection.

“A friend of mine had a baby, and it was so difficult because they didn’t even have water for basic cleaning,” Bhardwaj says.

Another friend of hers told her that she is worried that members of her family may get urinary tract infection. “They have three daughters of menstrual age, and little babies in that house.”

Bhardwaj explains that school-going children often live with a house mistress in one house in the orchards across Shimla so that they can get educated in a better school. ”These kids are not going in school-dresses these days because there’s not enough water to wash dirty uniforms,” Bhardwaj says.

‘People are stinking’

For Bhardwaj’s maid, Indra, 42, the situation is even worse. She lives nearby with her husband, two children, and a 90-year old father-in-law who, she says, has dysentery for the past four days.

The water she receives from the Shimla Municipal Corporation’s police-supervised tankers, she says, is dirty and contaminated, and she does not have enough gas in her house to boil it. Bhardwaj says that Indra is planning to put her family’s clothes outside when it rains, “so at least Dadu’s clothes which are stinking of urine and motion will get cleaned”.

While medicines are available for her father-in-law, Indra is borrowing filtered water on a daily basis from Bhardwaj in order to meet her basic needs. “She uses whatever water she can, but that room is smelly,” Bhardwaj says.

“People (in Shimla) are stinking,” and personal hygiene “is not happening,” she adds.

Tourists are being discouraged from visiting, the Himachal Pradesh government has postponed the Shimla Summer Festival, which was scheduled to begin last Friday, and municipal authorities are coming down heavily on illegal water connections.

While the situation in Shimla improved as authorities increased supply over the weekend, certain parts of the town are still waiting to be cleansed from this crisis.

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