Urban News

The Hindu 18.03.2010

Water Board proposes tariff for sewerage

J.S. Ifthekhar

Hyderabad: Hyderabadis watch out. Even if you do not have a water connection, you have to still pay for the sewerage. The Water Board has decided to go after such persons who are using its sewerage network and yet not paying a pie.

Task

The Board has set itself a daunting task of checking how many households in the twin cities have water tap connections. It has planned to take the help of property tax data of GHMC to zero in on the households. In fact the exercise is intended to find out how many households do not have water connections. According to rough estimates there are 12 lakh houses in the core city while the number of water connections is just 7.25 lakh.

Under the HMWSSB Act one has to pay for the sewerage let out into the Board's network even if one doesn't have a water connection. “This will not yield much revenue but we want to get into the net everyone using our sewerage system”, said K. Ashok Reddy, Executive Director, HMWSSB.

Verification

The Board will carry out a detailed physical verification using the GHMC property tax data. If somebody is not having a connection the Board wants to know whether its network has not reached him or one is simply not interested in taking a connection or a connection exists but it is not shown in the Board's data base. If none of these things are there it will be construed that the household has an illegal connection or using some other source to meet the water needs.

There are some 5,000 odd premises, mostly function halls and hotels, which are not depended on the Board's water. They are meeting their needs through private water tankers and bore wells. Whatever, they have to still pay for using the sewerage network, it is said.

So far the Board doesn't have a policy to collect sewerage cess alone. Its present minimum tariff of Rs.126.50 for 15 kl water includes Rs.90 towards water charges, Rs. 31.50 towards sewerage cess and service charge of Rs. 5. Now the Board propose to come up with a tariff for sewerage alone. “It will be proportional and not much”, Mr. Ashok Reddy said.

The Board hopes to complete the exercise fast and implement the new sewerage tariff from next month.

The Hindu 15.03.2010

Water supply yet to be restored

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Delay in interconnecting a pipeline laid as part of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-aided drinking water scheme with the existing pipeline network on the Vellayambalam-Kowdiar road caused most parts of the city to go without water for the whole of Sunday.

Work on interconnecting the pipelines, which began on Saturday, was to be completed by Sunday afternoon. However, even by midnight on Sunday, the work of welding the newly-connected pipelines was yet to be completed. Normal supply of water to all the affected areas is expected only by late Monday morning.

JICA officials and Kerala Water Authority re-started supply of water from the new JICA treatment plant at Aruvikkara by 11 p.m. on Sunday. Their aim was to reach this water to the reservoir at the Observatory Hill, via PTP Nagar. Both the 82-mld treatment plant at Aruvikkara and the JICA plant — which had been partially commissioned unofficially this month — had been shut down on Saturday afternoon to facilitate the interconnection work. However, the 36 million litres from this plant proved a poor substitute for the nearly 82 million litres that normally comes to the reservoir at Observatory Hills.

Some water from the 82-mld plant is tapped to feed the reservoir at Peroorkada. The Observatory reservoir shares some of its daily inflow with the reservoir that services the low-lying areas of the city. As a result, when this treatment plant was shut down, the operations of the Peroorkada reservoir and the one that services the low-lying areas were also hit. Moreover, it is the water from the low-level tank which is used to fill tanker lorries — mostly government-owned — at Vellayambalam.

Interconnection

The work on Saturday and Sunday involved the interconnection of the main pipeline bringing water from the 82-mld treatment plant at Aruvikkara and a new pipeline laid to the observatory hill as part of the JICA scheme.

This, according to JICA officials, would enable the KWA to ‘back feed' water from the reservoir at PTP Nagar to the reservoir at Observatory Hill, which services the low-lying areas of the city.