Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board’s (BWSSB) recent initiative to minimise wastage of water by plugging the leaks in pipelines in Bangalore South division has already started yielding results.

The quantity of water which is unaccounted for has been reduced from 51 to 28 per cent in Vidyanagar, BWSSB’s Chief Engineer Kemparamaiah said.

 He said private contractor Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has finished installing water flow meters and replacing worn-out pipelines in five of the selected 80 areas.

It has also started work on closing leaks and the unaccounted for water-level has come down in all the five areas, he added.

Kemparamaiah said nearly 48 per cent of the water supplied by the public utility agency is usually unaccounted for.

However, it has come down to 26 per cent in Gururaja Layout, 23 in Bhuvaneshwarinagar, 25 in Kalidasa Layout and 32 in Chikkallasandra.

According to the terms of the contract signed in April 2013, the BWSSB will release payments to L&T in proportion with the decrease in the unaccounted for water.

“L&T is confident of bringing (it) down to 16 per cent in Bangalore South by the end of three years,” Kemparamaiah said.

L&T has taken up the work with the help of Japan International Agency at a cost of `153.12 crore.

The company has to examine 147 km of water pipelines and re-lay them wherever necessary.

It is also tasked with tracking the water flow to 1,36,380 water connections in Banagiri, Devagiri, Girinagar, Katriguppe, Banashankari, Hoskerehalli, Kumaraswamy Layout, Poornapragna Layout, BTM Layout, Vijaya Bank Layout, Chamarajpet, MNK Park, Mount Joy, Nagendra Block, J P Nagar and surrounding areas in the city.

To this end, L&T has divided the zone into 80 district meter areas (DMA), based on the water pipelines in the zone and installed water flow meters in each DMA to analyse the pattern of water flow.

Besides wasting millions of litres of water, BWSSB is also incurring losses to the tune of `20 crore every month due to leakage.