Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board’s (BWSSB) ambitious automated water meter reading project aimed at eliminating the manual meter reading has run into rough weather due to lack of uniform mobile connectivity across the city.

BWSSB Engineer-in-chief T Venkatraju said, “We had brought 100 SIM cards from a company for installing them in the automatic meters to enable them to transfer the data to the centralised server. However, we were able to receive the readings from just 30 per cent of the meters. Though there was no fault with the remaining meters, they were unable to transmit the data due to lack of connectivity. Therefore, we are planning to engage the services of a more popular mobile phone company to see if we can get connectivity in every corner of the city to ensure our pilot project gives the desired results.”

The board has undertaken a pilot project to study the feasibility of eliminating manual meter reading through the automated meter reading technology at a cost of `3.6 crore and the Union government had partially funded the project. The BWSSB has installed 890 special designed water meters that are capable of transmitting minute-to-minute water meter reading to the centralised server in selected commercial establishments in a selected area. These meters were supposed to transmit the reading through the SIM cards that were installed in them and the BWSSB was supposed to cross check the data through the manual readings.

The service provider has developed a software to update the data received from the automated water meters on the internet. This system is also expected to help the customers track their water consumption regularly and pay their water bills through Internet. The BWSSB will decide on extending such services to the remaining parts of the city if this experiment proves successful.