NEW DELHI — The Delhi Jal Board announced this week that it would make meters mandatory on all borewells, allowing the city to measure how much groundwater is being pumped for the first time since it began approving borewells in 2010.

The 2010 permission system charged a one-time processing fee of Rs 500 and then, by every available account, stopped there. With no mechanism to track extraction, hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal borewells have run unmonitored through a decade of worsening summer shortages, a state of affairs officials had described as making groundwater management "transparent and effective."

"The permission policy was very effective at collecting the processing fee," said a senior official overseeing the shift to metered billing. "We are now entering the second phase, which involves finding out whether water is being removed from the ground."

Pressed on how the department intends to locate and meter hundreds of thousands of borewells, many of them inside private homes, officials confirmed that the committees responsible for the 2010 system would not be reviewed, and that a new committee would be constituted to oversee the effort.