On World Environment Day, the story of India's water bodies is
anything but positive. In Nainital, for the first time in 25
years , the city's only source of water, and a major tourist
attraction, the Naini Lake, has seen a 40 metre fall in water
levels. For a city that receives 35 mm of rainfall in May, this
time there has been none. But this hasn't stopped authorities in
the city from drawing as much as 25 lakh gallons of water from
the lake per day to fulfill the water requirements of the city
in this peak tourist season. The saddest story though, is very
much in India's capital, Delhi. The Yamuna is almost a dead
river now. The government claims that over the last 20 years it
has pumped Rs 200 crore into cleaning up the river, but inspite
of this huge money, as much as 2,000 million litres of sewage,
most of it untreated, goes into the Yamuna from Delhi everyday.
Old timers recall boating at hotspots like the Okhla barrage.
Today, all that can be seen is a white frothy layer on the
river's waters. In Mumb