NEW DELHI: Ahead of the summer season, the live storage capacity in India’s 150 primary reservoirs stands at just 38 per cent of their total capacity, which is less than the last decade’s average for the same period, according to data.Cities like Bengaluru are already grappling with a shortfall of around 500 million litres of water per day (MLD), against a demand of 2,600 MLD.Karnataka, among other states, registered lower storage levels compared to the same period last year, according to the weekly bulletin by the Central Water Commission.Bengaluru hosts 14,000 borewells with 6,900 of them having dried up.Water bodies have either been encroached upon or have dried up.The city requires 2,600 MLD of water, out of which 1,470 MLD is sourced from the Cauvery River and 650 MLD from borewells, Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah had told reporters.Several other states, including Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura, Rajasthan, Bihar, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (two combined projects in both states), and Tamil Nadu, also reported lower storage levels compared to last year.The total live storage capacity of these 150 reservoirs is 178784 BCM, which accounts for about 69.35 per cent of the nation’s total live storage capacity estimated at 257.812 billion cubic metres, according to official data.
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