The Directorate of Municipal Administration (DMA) is working on reducing the number of days taken to approve and provide a water connection. The DMA proposes to reduce the number of days from 15 to eight working days.

The proposal will be sent to the Sakala Department and a final call will be taken, said N Manjula, director, DMA.

According to the DMA proposal, it would take a customer about half-an-hour to download the application form for a water connection from the website of the Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Drainage Board (KUWSDB). It would take another half-a-day to submit it along with documents to KUWSDB. Three days have been allotted for verification of documents, analysis of technical and legal issues, spot inspections and collection of information in electronic form with GPS and GIS linkage. After verification of documents, the KUWSDB will inform the applicant through SMS/email if his application has been accepted or not.

Once an application is approved, one day has been provided to applicants to pay the fees and two days for the KUWSDB to mobilise resources, execute work and provide connections. A non-value adding period of one day has also been provided for the consumer to visit the department and pay fees.

The initial plan, which was proposed by an AEE of the KUWSDB, was to reduce the number of days from 15 to five. However, this was later increased to eight days as officials of various government departments said the AEE’s proposal was cutting it too close. “The initial proposal was to reduce the number of days to five. But officials raised various constraints and difficulties to do this and so, a second proposal of 7-8 days was made. They did not have any major objections to this and so we will propose it to the Sakala Department,” said Manjula.

If the proposal is accepted, the number of days required to get a water connection will be reduced by half in most urban areas in the State (not including BWSSB).