More than 10 million people in Delhi, India, the national capital territory, were without water Monday after a protest over jobs seized the city’s main water source.
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For now, he said, the government was using existing reserves and other water sources to meet the need.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has called a cabinet meeting in the afternoon to take stock of the situation in the wake of the Jat stir.
Supply has been partially restored in some parts of north and central Delhi and 70 water tankers of DJB deployed in these areas were now diverted to west Delhi, he said.
With the canal and its water supply machinery, which has been damaged, not being in control of the authorities, Delhi’s water woes are likely to aggravate in the coming days.
The Jats, traditionally a farming community in India’s ancient system of caste hierarchy, were demanding quotas in government jobs and educational institutions.
Talks were held in Delhi Sunday between Jat leaders, national Home Minister Rajnath Singh and the Haryana government run by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Sixteen people have been killed and hundreds hurt in three days of riots.
Jats constitute at least a quarter of Haryana’s population and see the quotas as reverse discrimination, denying them access to a large number of jobs.
He also complained of illegal trading of packaged water because of the current shortage of supplies from state utilities.
New Delhi suffers from low rainfall and already struggling to ensure the water supply of its almost 17 million inhabitants.
India’s Supreme Court has rejected inclusion of Jats in the list of OBC list on the ground that India’s commission of backward castes does not consider Jats socially and economically backward in Haryana. In Hissar, Jat protestors lifted their dharna from the railway track at Mayyar clearing the Delhi-Hissar rail route.
“We will fully compensate the losses of people who have suffered”, Khattar told the traders whose shops were looted and torched by the rioters.
The protests eased overnight Sunday after the state government agreed to the Jat community’s demands.
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An Indian pedestrian walks past a burnt-out bus following violent caste protests in Rohtak on Februa …
