Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board’s (BWSSB) recent initiative
to minimise wastage of water by plugging the leaks in pipelines in
Bangalore South division has already started yielding results.
The
quantity of water which is unaccounted for has been reduced from 51 to
28 per cent in Vidyanagar, BWSSB’s Chief Engineer Kemparamaiah said.
He
said private contractor Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has finished
installing water flow meters and replacing worn-out pipelines in five of
the selected 80 areas.
It has also started work on closing leaks and the unaccounted for water-level has come down in all the five areas, he added.
Kemparamaiah said nearly 48 per cent of the water supplied by the public utility agency is usually unaccounted for.
However,
it has come down to 26 per cent in Gururaja Layout, 23 in
Bhuvaneshwarinagar, 25 in Kalidasa Layout and 32 in Chikkallasandra.
According
to the terms of the contract signed in April 2013, the BWSSB will
release payments to L&T in proportion with the decrease in the
unaccounted for water.
“L&T is confident of bringing (it) down to 16 per cent in Bangalore South by the end of three years,” Kemparamaiah said.
L&T has taken up the work with the help of Japan International Agency at a cost of `153.12 crore.
The company has to examine 147 km of water pipelines and re-lay them wherever necessary.
It
is also tasked with tracking the water flow to 1,36,380 water
connections in Banagiri, Devagiri, Girinagar, Katriguppe, Banashankari,
Hoskerehalli, Kumaraswamy Layout, Poornapragna Layout, BTM Layout,
Vijaya Bank Layout, Chamarajpet, MNK Park, Mount Joy, Nagendra Block, J P
Nagar and surrounding areas in the city.
To this end, L&T has
divided the zone into 80 district meter areas (DMA), based on the water
pipelines in the zone and installed water flow meters in each DMA to
analyse the pattern of water flow.
Besides wasting millions of litres of water, BWSSB is also incurring losses to the tune of `20 crore every month due to leakage.
