The poor three wheeler driver Afsar Ali and an eminent veterinarian J.K. Shrivastava have many things in common.

For one, both stay awake for the better part of the night to store water for the next day. Ali stands in a long queue before the lone hand pump in his colony to fill his bucket. Shrivastava waits and watches anxiously as water trickles down from a tape connected through a pipe to the Hill Tank so that he can pump it up in the tank on his rooftop. All this he does quite secretly of course. If he sleeps, he runs the risk of getting his tape closed by night guards or his water 'stolen' from the pump by 'water thieves' roaming in the dark.

As the sun comes out ferociously next morning Shrivastava and Ali find themselves facing the music from their wives and kids for 'settling down' at a place bereft of water. Their nightlong quest is in vain, as they are unable to store water enough to fill the families' need.

Shrivastava lives in Jaiprakash Nagar off the Bariatu road while Ali has his thatched home at the Bariatu hill's bottom. Their plea to their kids 'to maintain economy of water' is returned with cantankerous words. I sympathise with both them for I have some sort of dependence on both. While Shrivastava is my landlord, Ali occasionally drops in to wash my car or do some odd work.

This summer has been a great leveller. Be it a poor driver or an affluent doctor, Ranchi people have suffered the worst ever water crisis in the prolonged heat spell that has taken the ground water lower, besides drying up the Rukka, Kanke and Hatia dams, a source of water to Ranchi water tanks. One Bablu Tirki was murdered in a quarrel over using a hand pump in Hindipiri in May. The incident is just a prelude.

What surprises me is the mindless way in which the city is undergoing building boom. I watch the two large multi-storied building complexes coming up in our small colony, helplessly. Each complex will have the capacity to accommodate 50 families which entails at least 500 people living in the area. Where will the water come from when 500 more people are added to its population? Currently there is no water to cater to about 15 homes that the colony has.

Moreover, I do not find these complexes making any arrangement for rainwater harvesting or conserving water for the families, which will occupy them. The builders have bored the earth up to 280 to 300 feet to fetch water. But with the water table going down in the rainless summer such borings are fraught with danger to aggravate the crisis even more. Jaiprakash Nagar is not the lone colony where multi-storied buildings are coming up. Numerous such complexes are been built in Morhabadi and even in water starved Harmu, Hindpiri and Doranda. One is unable to understand why the state's Water Board does not make it mandatory for the builders to make arrangements for rainwater harvesting in the high rises. And why should they be allowed to make high rises, which should have been a feature of planes on riverbanks rather than a plateau like Ranchi? The experts believe that Ranchi is best suited for small houses with lots of vacant space for the rainwater to seep inside.

What shocks more is the 'criminal neglect' of the crisis by the peoples' representatives. The Assembly is in the session for the last two weeks. But the 'peoples representatives' have so far not felt the need to raise this issue strongly or debate (as they always do) on the measures that should be adopted to address the crisis. UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has responded to Sonia Gandhi's and Sheila Dikshit's call to supply water to Delhi. I wonder who will make a call to solve water crisis in Ranchi and who will respond.

Nalin Verma The Author is the Ranchi based special correspondent of the Telegraph