Before the tanker arrived in one of New Delhi’s largest slums, Arvind Kumar was pacing between the gate of a government school and a tea vendor’s stall, hundreds of meters from his home, where he lives with nine members of his family.
“There it is,” Mr. Kumar shouted to a woman waiting on the outskirts of the slum. It had been days since their small part of the slum, which usually gets a tanker truck every two weeks or so, had received water. With the last stored deliveries now exhausted, the two neighbors had decided to ensure that the truck reached its destination as soon as possible. heat wave burns the city.
The woman boarded the 5,000-gallon tanker truck and guided its driver through a narrow lane, past houses lined with thousands of jerry cans, many of them chained together, and onto a stony plateau.
“Sometimes you have to kidnap the driver,” Mr. Kumar, a salesman, said smiling, “otherwise you will see your children die of thirst in this deadly heat.”
Over the past few days, temperatures in parts of northern India have hovered well above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 43 degrees Celsius. More … than 60 peoplemany of whom work or participate in general elections of the countrywhose results will be announced on Tuesday, have died, according to media reports.
In Delhi, the streets look like an oven. Work performance and mobility were reduced. Parks usually full of joggers are sparsely populated. Outside the gardens of Humayun’s Tomb, lemonade sellers complained of a drop in business.
“I myself drink more glasses of water than I sell,” said a seller, Sham Yadav.
With the intense heat, water – piped or trucked to residents – is now scarce for some 25 million people in the national capital region of Delhi.
Every summer, Delhi’s water table decreases due to the huge demand. But this year’s crisis has also highlighted the growing dysfunction of India’s national governance, with states often locked in political battles with each other or with the central government. The Delhi regional government has appealed to the country’s highest court to force a neighboring state to release excess water that a second state had supplied to Delhi.
While authorities have been forced to ration water across the capital region, the crisis has affected almost everyone, regardless of their status. But the challenges are particularly severe for the poor.
The slum where Mr. Kumar lives, Kusumpur Pahari, is not connected to running water. The government defines the slum as an illegal settlement of migrant workers, although people have lived there for three generations. It is a maze of narrow streets and shantytowns surrounded on one side by glittering shopping malls and on the other by upscale residential enclaves.
Inside its walls are more than 50,000 people. Many work as cleaners for nearby embassies, drivers for diplomats, cleaners for the rich. Their lives are punctuated by the horn of the tanker truck.
All day long, the residents of the slum struggle to fill their jerrycans with water to drink, wash their clothes and bathe.
“It’s worse this summer,” said Monika Singh, 23, a political science graduate who was born in Kusumpur Pahari and said she might die here.
Throughout her life, before breakfast, before getting ready for class, before choosing what to wear, she wondered how and where to store water. “Slowly, as the population increases, the war for water gets worse,” she said. “This year, it’s really, Really bad.”
For decades, residents of Kusumpur Pahari and other slums have fought over the drops of water dumped by water tankers. This summer is no different; A video Residents running after, jumping and crowding around a fuel truck in a slum near the US embassy have gone viral on Indian social media.
“Here, people can kill you for water if you don’t listen to them,” said Surinder Singh, the driver of the tanker Mr. Kumar and his neighbor were waiting for this weekend in Kusumpur Pahari.
When another truck approached to make the second of two water deliveries that part of the slum receives each day, men and women gathered around it, forcing the driver to stop.
“If you come any closer, I’ll slit your throat,” a broad-shouldered woman named Neetu shouted at three women who tried to snatch a garden hose from her hands.
“Give me first,” shouted Geeta, a housewife, who pushed Neetu to the ground.
“You have an adult family; both my children haven’t had a bath in days,” said another woman, Sarita, snatching the hose from Geeta.
“If you don’t give it to me,” she continued, “I’m going to break this bucket over your head, so you won’t be able to fill your bucket.”
