How a Delhi district stopped the ground from sinking

BBC News:

India’s Himalayan town of Joshimath has been in the news for sinking slowly into ground because of uncontrolled construction and indiscriminate extraction of groundwater. Experts fear several cities in the country could meet the same fate. However, a neighbourhood in the capital Delhi reduced its reliance on groundwater and reversed the trend of land subsidence. BBC’s Nitin Srivastava reports.

Sudha Sinha, 54, and her family shifted to Dwarka in 1998 because they wanted greener surroundings and to be closer to Indian capital’s airport.

But soon, they discovered that the neighbourhood had no piped water. Instead they had to use groundwater pumped up by a borewell for use as drinking water, for bathing and other everyday purposes.

As more people migrated to Dwarka over the years, hundreds of borewells, some as deep as 60m (196ft), were dug by residents and builders to meet the rising demand for water.

• The trauma of living in India’s sinking Himalayan town

“Residential apartments, markets, schools were mushrooming and everyone was using groundwater,” remembers Ms Sinha.

When groundwater is pumped out, the land above it sinks – and this leads to land subsidence. Several studies showed that the same was happening in Dwarka.

A government report said Dwarka was seeing land subsidence due to groundwater depletion. A University of Cambridge report corroborated that the neighbourhood had subsided by around 3.5cm (1.4in) in 2014 alone.