Division VI covers posh areas of Jubilee Hills, Banjara Hills, Sanjeeva Reddy Nagar, Vengal Rao Nagar, Ameerpet, Punjagutta and Somajiguda.

A team led by HMWS&SB Managing Director MT Krishna Babu and senior Water Board officials will visit Mumbai shortly to study the technologies, already being used there and said to be giving positive results. About 3 lakh

RFID metres were fixed under the JNNURM in Mumbai. Speaking to Expresso, Krishna Babu said after studying the technologies a suitable one for Greater Hyderabad will be implemented.

Though GSM technology is said to be superior to RFID, it is very expensive. Each GSM water meter costs about Rs 35,000 whereas RFID one comes for Rs 20,000. The new meters will be fixed for 20,000 connections in the first phase and extended to another 20,000 connections in the second phase.

RFID is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify objects and help in meter reading. There are several methods of identification, but the most common is to store a serial number that identifies a person or object, and perhaps other information, on a microchip that is attached to an antenna. The antenna enables the chip to transmit the identification

information to a reader. The reader converts the radio waves reflected back from the RFID tag into digital information that can then be passed on to computers.