If you don’t go thirsty, can afford to bathe twice a day, your WC does not throw up and you don’t have to take a bumpy ride to a home plunged in darkness due to a powercut, you could be in Amdavad, but not yet...

Let’s face it. There is an Amdavad that lives on one bank of the Sabarmati where people queue up at public taps, public toilets and use the road to bath from a bucketful of water. And there is an Amdavad on the other bank which loves a warm shower after an exhausting day, drives fast cars and lives on air-conditioned comfort. Neither can be ignored. If one is a tax-payer, the other is a votebank, and both are the faces of Ahmedabad Next. Both kinds of dwellers can lose their heads if their taps and showers dry up, or their ACs and televisions blink off.

Before the year 2000, Ahmedabad was struggling with its basics, a dried up water source, exploited water table, a drainage system that needed to be tightened, potholed roads while politicians fought over whether Ahmedabad should be called Karnavati, and whether religious shrines that encroached roads should be demolished.

Although the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation was flush with funds and had gone public, precious time and money was wasted over whom to name bridges and roads and installing and reinstalling statues. And the city’s population had hit beyond five million.

It was in these years that Ahmedabad, after not getting enough water from the Dharoi dam on the Sabarmati, brought the Mahi waters through the Raska weir, but still faced a shortfall. Now there is the Narmada, which has taken care of the water shortage problem but residents are hesitant to pay for its connections.

Many parts of the city which lives in bungalows in the far west like Bopal or even in the old AMC areas like Ranip have soak pits. Officials admit that since the mid 80s wh e n A h m e d - ab a d m e r g e d with eastern areas to the new merger of the western areas, 15 per cent of the city remains unconnected with the sewage treatment network.

Experts say only when something is done about these areas which burst into cesspools and lead to breeding of mosquitoes and diseases, can Ahmedabad actually become a megacity.

The Amdavadi in Navrangpura may rarely throw a tantrum over a low pressure water supply. He quietly installs a pump and pulls his share. The newage Amdavadi needs to learn that there is no free lunch in a mega city. TNN

By 2021, Ahmedabad might be assured of a 24x7 piped water supply. Underground water has total dissolved solids almost 10 times the WHO standard
Plans are afoot to treat sewage upto 1,075 MLDs for the next decade. A world class Vasna sewerage plant for industrial belt.
CG Road and Ashram Road are the two best designed roads in the city. Gandhi Road and Relief Road have a high accident rate of 30 incidents per hour.
Ten flyovers on the city road map to decongest traffic on the existing road network. The waiting time at traffic junctions will reduce from 15 to 2-5 minutes.