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).