Urban News

Even after the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s Rs 50-crore initiative of posting security guards along its vast and complex water distribution network, the picture remains grim with large water mains outside the city and smaller pipes within its limits remaining far from secure.

Newsline travelled along the four water mains, Upper Vaitarna, Modaksagar, Tansa (East) and Tansa (West) — parallely running from the lakes in Shahapur to Gundavli in Thane district — to find innumerable leakages and thefts, besides encroachments close to pipelines.

At Balkumbh village near Kapurbawdi in Thane, it is a daily routine for villagers to walk along the Upper Vaitarna and Modaksagar pipelines looking for leakages to fill their buckets while some of them do not hesitant to drive wooden wedges into pipe joints to cause leaks. “The water gets wasted anyway. What is wrong if we use it?” Manju, a resident of Balkumbh says, adding, “We do not get water supply in our village.”

She washes clothes under the leaking pipes measuring 108 inches in diameter. Asked who had removed the screws on the pipe joints and inserted wooden wedges to facilitate flow of water from the leakage, she says, “I don’t know, I did not do it.”

Meanwhile, workers at the Gundavli post of the BMC’s hydraulic engineering department, who are in charge of maintenance of these pipelines, expressed their inability in keeping constant vigil. “Often we are threatened and attacked by villagers when we go to spots where there is a rupture or leakage to repair it. Moreover, the valves are difficult to close during a burst as the pressure has to be calculated lest it cause an increased pressure at some other point in the pipe and cause it to burst,” said a worker.

The Tansa East and West pipelines, laid by the British in the 1920s, are the main cause of worry for the civic body.

“These pipes are old and their lower parts have rusted and thinned. It will be difficult to plug leakages in them till the Tansa replacement project is completed,” the worker added. Under the Tansa project, the BMC has carried out patchworks on the lower portions of the pipeline in major parts of the stretch.

The civic body’s Tansa replacement project entails replacement of the existing two 1,800-mm diameter, riveted pipelines with a single, mild-steel welded pipeline of 2,750-mm diameter. However, three years after the work was sanctioned at a total cost of Rs 406 crore, only 5 km of the total 45-km stretch has been replaced. Also, the making way for the pipeline through the rocky terrain is a lengthy process, and is going on at a snail’s pace, the Newsline observed.

Following demands from corporators, the BMC had recently posted security guards at regular intervals along the water mains within the city.

However, equipped with nothing more than a baton, they haven’t been able to change things much. “I walk along the stretch allocated to me once in a day and check for any leakages or thefts. If I find someone stealing water I shoo them away,” said a guard from the Urban Hawk Security Services which has been awarded the contract for securing the pipelines.

At a spot between the Pogaon Chowk and Agra Road Chowk of the hydraulic department, a man filled four bottle of water by inserting a narrow pipe into the bottom part of the water main even as a guard stood and watched.