Urban News

The Deccan Chronicle  20.10.2010

Oct. 19: The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) has come up with an ambitious plan to plug water leaks in the city. It has proposed a Rs 1,100-crore project with the aim of reducing 200 mld of water loss. The BWSSB has been losing 41 per cent of its water as it is unaccounted for. “We are planning to provide water supply and sewerage connections to 350 slums and have already begun work at 120 slums and have identified three NGOs to help in the process,” P.B. Ramamurthy, chairperson of BWSSB during a conference on infrastructure, sustainable transportation and urban planning said at a conference on infrastructure, sustainable transportation and urban planning on Tuesday.

“We also plan for raw water conduting at the cost of Rs 100 crore to prevent breaching and a standby line, in case of shut down of the regular line, to maintain uninterrupted supply of water to the city is also in pipeline. The project to lay water pipelines to 110 villages, which were left out in BBMP areas, has been approved by the Cabinet and we will soon take up the work,” Mr Ramamurthy said. Encouraged by the success of the Computerised Revenue Management System adopted by the BWSSB, the Water Board is now all set to take up the E-governance Vision 2010-13. Under the system, BWSSB plans to set up a Centralised Data Processing Unit where databases of all 26 sub-divisions will be merged, enabling one to make Web and cell phone-based payments soon, Mr Ramamurthy said. He added the data centre was expected to be commissioned in three to four months as part of the project and automatic meter readers would be installed at individual connections.

During supply hours, the technical staff of BWSSB will measure water pressure using portable pressure gauge equipment in the specified area. The data will be captured and transferred to the central server for analysis and monitoring, Mr Ramamurthy said.

With the new data centre, daily ward-wise, area-wise, street-wise and distribution point-wise logs will be captured centrally and the distribution details will be made available to the public to make the service more transparent. The contact details of the concerned service stations will also be made available, he said. Mr Ramamurthy added that this would not just help the process of analysing data but would also turn out to be a very effective tool for tariff revision analysis and consumption analysis of various categories.

BWSSB currently has 6.23 lakh water connections. With the introduction of e-governance, there are 92 automated 24X7 kiosks and all the connections are metered with faulty meters accounting for only 1.34 per cent.