\u201cOn kar!\u201d someone shouts in Hinglish into the darkness; almost instantly, his orders to \u201cswitch it on\u201d are obeyed. Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole\u2019s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks\u2019 tanks.<\/p>\n
Within 15 minutes, the 2,642-gallon (10,000-liter) containers on the first three rigs are full. The pumps are switched off briefly as drivers move their now-heavy trucks forward and another trio takes their place. The routine is repeated again and again through the night until every tanker is brimming with water.<\/p>\n
The full trucks don\u2019t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, drivers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby highway. There, they turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty. They go to factories and hospitals, malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across this city of 25 million.<\/p>\n
Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment. \u201cWater work is night work,\u201d says a middle-aged neighbor who rents a house near the covert pumping station and requested anonymity. \u201cBosses arrange buyers, labor fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says nothing to nobody.\u201d Tonight, that muscle\u2014burly, bearded, and in tight-fitting T-shirts\u2014has little to do: Sitting near the trucks, the men are absorbed in a game of cards. At dawn, the crew switches off the generators, stows the hoses in the shack from which they came, and places the tarp back over the boreholes. Few traces of the night\u2019s frenetic activity remain.<\/p>\n
Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the city\u2019s needs by at least 207 million gallons each day, according to a 2013 audit by the office of the Indian comptroller and auditor general. A quarter of Delhi\u2019s households live without a piped-water connection; most of the rest receive water for only a few hours each day. So residents have come to rely on private truck owners\u2014the most visible strands of a dispersed web of city councilors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water each day from illicit boreholes, as well as the city\u2019s leaky pipe network, and sell the liquid for profit.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nA man fills a tanker while another drills a borehole at an illegal water-filling point in Delhi. \u00a0 \u00a0Water in Delhi<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Aman Sethi writes: \u00a0Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep … Continue reading