History
With the few thousand wells feeding the population of Mumbai tending to go dry during summer, the acute shortage of water resulted in protests by the local residents in June 1845. A two man committee, appointed by the British rulers of the time, to examine the grievances of the agitators concurred with water shortage problem and stressed the urgent need to solve the water supply problem of Mumbai.
The Committee appointed by the government located suitable sites to construct dams and create reservoirs to store the monsoon flows of the Mithi river catchment, which resulted in presently existing Vihar Lake, Tulsi Lake and the Powai Lake. Vihar reservoir was the first piped water supply scheme of Mumbai.
In 1850, Captain Crawford submitted a report favouring the Vihar Scheme for the Mumbai city’s water supply needs.
Work on the “Vihar Water Works” commenced in January 1856 and was completed in 1860, during the governorship of John Lord Elphinstone.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC),a Govt. body which controls the lake's affairs has also acquired agricultural land in the catchment area of the Vihar lake as a sanitary precaution.
Read more about this topic: Vihar Lake
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)