Prateek Tanmay
4 min readPuneJun 19, 2026 09:49 PM IST
Soon after the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) announced a closure of swimming pools as one of the ways to ease the city’s water crisis, caused by a below-normal monsoon, Vinay Marathe, a national swimming coach, who has won the state government’s Shiv Chhatrapati Award, wrote a letter to Ganesh Bidkar, Leader of the House in the PMC. Marathe, who has trained ranked Indian national and international swimmers, said that the civic body needed to ‘reconsider this decision’.
“Swimming pools contain approx 400,000-500,000 litre of chlorinated water. If swimming pools close, should this treated water simply be drained into the sewer? This chlorinated water cannot be used for agriculture, drinking or gardening because it contains 1–2 parts per million (PPM) of chlorine. Its only practical purpose is for swimming,” he wrote in the letter.
Marathe told The Indian Express that closing pools was not the answer to the present crisis. “If the swimming pools in the city drained out two to five lakh litres of water, there would be a big problem. Baadh aa jayegi (there will be a flood). Swimming pools do not change their water every day. The water is rotated and a pool needs 10,000 litres of fresh water as top-up every week,” he says.
“We are ready to shut down the incoming water from PMC, because we all have our own borewells to supply the 10,000 litres of water. We can top-up the water from the borewell,” says Marathe.
Earlier in 2018, the Devendra Fadnavis government had issued a similar instruction. Marathe was among the delegation that had travelled to Mumbai to meet with the Chief Minister.
“He had the impression that swimming pools were wasting water. After we explained to him that we were reusing water, he withdrew his order,” says Marathe, who is the proprietor of the Champion Club, established in 2001 with the vision to create a fitter population. He says that he is prepared to meet the CM again.
Marathe adds that pools “help people as swimming is a total-body exercise”. He says that doctors prescribe aqua therapy, such as walking, for a lot of elderly people who have knee or back problems. “Such patients will suffer if pools close down. He adds that healthy people swim for exercise throughout the year,” he says.
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The swimming coach says competitive swimmers, who train the year around, are preparing for the District Meets, State Meets and National Meets that will be held from the end of June. “Their effort will be wasted if pools close,” he says.
Marathe has told the PMC that he ‘would go a step further and say: if there is water scarcity at home, people should come to the swimming pool’.
“Those who already know how to swim can enjoy one of the finest forms of full-body exercise, and those who do not know how to swim can use this opportunity to learn. This is the right time to save water while also promoting physical fitness. If people spend time swimming, domestic and housing society water consumption can also be reduced,” he wrote in the letter.
