THE 17 five-star hotels in Delhi try to do justice to the exotic aqua pura, the drink of dreams. pure and simple, they not only guzzle water that the city can scant afford, they refuse to recycle it as well. At 800 kilolitres (kl) daily per hotel, their water consumption could meet the entire daily requirements of the 1.3 million slum-dwellers in the city.

The Maurya Sheraton of the ITC group has an average daily consumption of about 1,000 kl, of which the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMQ supplies 400 kl. Its own borewells can easily douse the hotel; it, however, feels that if it stops taking water from NDMC, the corporation will stop supply on the "no need principle".

This is an amazing admission: water comprises only 5 per cent of the hotel's annual energy bill of Rs 22 lakh. The topsy-turvy economics is obvious from the fact that it would save enormously if it were to depend on its own borewell and stopped taking NDMC water. Today, the only water recycled is 100 km from the filter backlash. This month, it plans to double its recycling capacity by investing in a Rs 16 lakh effluent treatment plant.

But the hotels, like the Oberoi with its 400 kl/day purified from kitchen and laundry waste, normally use their recycled water only for horticultural or cooling-tower purposes.

Says Arun fain, assistant chief engineer of Hotel Hyatt Regency, "The guests would shrink from using recycled water. And then, expensive recycling is unhygienic." The Hyatt, with its gigantic atrium waterfall, has no recycling facilities.

What are needed are larger effluent treatment plants like the Oberoi's and the Maurya Sheraton's, which could then be extended for laundry and kitchen purposes. Allied with their recently-installed water conservancy systems, an autoflush with censors that lets rip only after the toilet has been used, the savings are considerable. Three of these Rs 4,000 autoflushes are working hard on a test run, and half-a-dozen more are in the pipeline.

Hotel Le Meridien, plagued by a water problem, conscripts upto 40 tankers a day in summer, using its borewell for flushing alone. Says Meridian's chief engineer, S S Sohi, "I don't think it would be advisable for us to buy a costly effluent treatment plant without studying its performance in other hotels."

The other side of it is that the NDMC and the Delhi Development Authority have been sitting on an application filed by the Taj Palace for a storage tank to increase the hotel's recycling capacity. Environmental tardiness works various ways.