At a meeting between officials of the Delhi Jal Board and Dwarka’s Federation of Cooperative Group Housing Societies, the former accepted that there had been no verification of water bills before they were dispatched to the societies. According to the Federation, DJB had sent wrong bills for water, bore wells and also the rain water harvesting system.
After the meeting, which was presided over by Sudha Sinha, general secretary of Dwarka and V Selvarajan, secretary CGHS Federation, a Federation representative told City Spidey that DJB had instructed them not to pay any unverified bills.
“Though they have not given us anything in writing yet they have verbally reiterated this point. They have also added that the penalty imposed on rain-water harvesting systems will be rolled back,” the representative said.
Sudha Sinha said that her society, Delhi Apartments in Sector 22, too had received faulty bills. She added that a penalty had been imposed despite the rain-water harvesting systems in their society being functional. “This is unfortunate. They should have verified the bills properly before sending them to the residents.”
Incidentally, rain- water harvesting does not entail a separate bill. However, people who have rain-water harvesting mechanisms pay a higher consolidated water bill to the DJB. The issue of sending bills without verification of the rain water harvesting systems was also raised last summer in the course of a meeting with the area MLA, Gulab Singh Yadav in the presence of DJB officials. The MLA had assured to solve the problems.
DJB Vice Chairman Dinesh Mohania and the area MLA Gulab Singh Yadav were also present in the recent meeting, the outcome of which was posted on Facebook.
Secretary of Federation of CGHS and a resident of Diamond Square Apartments in Sector 6, V Selvarajan, who was also present at the meeting said, “Everyone knows that Dwarka had water supply issues before 2015. Water supply was mostly through tankers which were duly supplemented with groundwater. However, now that water supply is sufficient, no one is dependent on groundwater. Taxing societies just because bore wells exist now is illogical, unjustifiable and not sustainable." Now that DJB has accepted that the bills were generated without verification, law abiding citizens have reason to doubt and question the efficacy of its functioning. "We hope that DJB shall be pragmatic in approaching the issues, in terms of both bore well and rainwater harvesting,” says Selvarajan.
