Water Usage at Dhobighat Per Day

On the 8th of March 2025 a meeting was held between some representatives of dhobis, Institute officials and 4 student representatives on the impending eviction of dhobis. In this meeting one of the Institute officials claimed that the daily water usage at the dhobi ghat was 1 lakh litre and which they also claimed is 20% of the total water usage of the Institute. Hence to save this water wastage the Institute is opting for the installation of industrial size washing machines in which water would be used more efficiently. We at Hamara Manch tried to examine this claim and below is our analysis.

Claim 1: Dhobi Ghat uses 1 lakh litre of water Daily

There are 37 tanks at the Dhobi Ghat of varying dimensions (see pictures at the end). Using the data collected from the volume of the water used in washing tanks at Dhobi Ghat for washing around 4000 clothes in a day the daily usage of water comes to around 22000 to 25000 litres per day as is calculated in the Table below.* This is at most 1/4th of the amount claimed by the Institute official.

Claim 2: Dhobi Ghat uses 20% of the entire Water Consumption of the Institute

 The Sustainability Report 2023 of IITK (https://iitk.ac.in/ckc/data/Sustainability_Report-5a.pdf, p10) claims that the Institute uses 4 million litres of water per day (40 lakh litres per day), which is eight times more than  the claim made by the Institute official, deduced by his claim that 1 lakh litre used at the dhobi ghat was 20% of the water usage of the Institute. Considering the usage of 25000 litres per day in dhobi ghat the actual water consumption comes to barely 0.625% of the water usage of the institute.

The above facts completely contradict the claims being made by the Institute and raise important questions about the Institute’s justification for replacing the dhobi service with machines:

·       Currently we have an effective and efficient dhobi service, which provides personalized services to over 4000 odd students of this campus at Rs. 300 for 30 clothes. Why is the institute insisting on mechanizing this service?

·       In the minutes of the CoSHA meeting held on 19th March, students have unanimously stated that they are happy with the current dhobi service and do not want mechanization of this service, as they face multiple problems even while using existing washing machines. Then why is the institute adamant on mechanizing the current washing service which would have not only high establishment, electricity and maintenance costs but its reliability when compared to current dhobi service is questionable.  Also, appropriate structures will need to be made for housing the industrial scale machines.