Borehole registration is 11 years too late - MLP

Labour infrastructure spokesman Charles Buhagiar said today that the government decision to register all boreholes was welcome, but this initiative was 11 years too late.

Such a scheme was launched by a Labour government in 1997 but no monitoring was made on new drilling in the following years, he said, and hundreds of illegal boreholes had been drilled since.

Such lack on control on groundwater extraction had severely depleted the water table, to the extent that it was now endangered, Mr Buhagiar said.

The risk, however, was that with an increase in water tariffs, groundwater extraction would actually increase. Before increasing such tariffs, the government should come up with a scheme to distribute second-class water to farms, thus using the output of the sewage purification plants, Mr Buhagiar said,