Mainul Haq, a senior executive of a shipping company, requires water supply at least thrice a day to carry his daily household work and other needs of a four-member family at his Agrabad CDA Colony residence. Instead, he gets water twice a day and sometimes once, and this poor supply for the last few weeks put him in deep trouble and hassle. And he often found at a loss how to cope with the ever-compounding crisis. Like Mainul, this is the plight of thousands of city dwellers in Chittagong, the second largest city with around 40 lakh people, which lags far behind as far as daily demand of water is needed. According to sources at Water and Sewerage Authority (Wasa) here, the daily demand of water in Chittagong is over 500 MLD (Million Litres per Day), which is equivalent to 50 crore litres. But the total water production at Chittagong Wasa installations stands at only 170 MLD (17 crore litres). Of them, Wasa produces 90 MLD through treatment of water of the river Halda at Mohora Water Treatment Plant while the rest 80MLD comes from 52 deep tubewells at different areas of the city. Since the onset of summer hot, water woes continues to aggravate day by day. While demand for water is increasing this time around, production of water is equally falling down to dishearten the city dwellers that occur largely due to poor power supply. "Life becomes miserable these days owing to shortage of water coupled with erratic supply of power and frequent loadshedding,' Mainul said adding, "My colony had long been infamous for all basic-cum-civic crises especially shortage of water. It is worsened further for the last few weeks.' Worst more to these tales is the plummeting of water level of the Wasa deep tubewells. For this, many tubewells couldn't pump out water regularly while some of them remain non-functional for weeks together due to technical glitches. "Water crisis nowadays virtually strangles my life so much so that I couldn't sleep in peace at night for the last few weeks,' said MA Taher, vice chairman of Tea Traders Association of Bangladesh (TTAB). Taher is a landlord at Kapasgola, city's another worst-hit area in terms of water supply, and had six pucca and semi-pucca buildings with over 150 tenants. As a landlord he had to ensure regular water supply to them, a task he now find too tough to maintain. "In daytime supply of Wasa water is very poor while its relatively good in midnight. So, I used to spent sleepless night to preserve sufficient Wasa water into the reservoirs and tanks so that my tenants get adequate water the following day,' he added. When city people battle with such a situation Bangladesh Army came forward to rid them of the crisis, to some extent. In assistance with Chittagong Wasa and Chittagong City Corporation, they started supplying pure drinking water to different wards from last week. A control room has also been set up in this purpose and city dwellers have been asked to inform the control room about their requirements.