Kerala - Alappuzha   

Water project for Cherthala hits roadblocks

Dennis Marcus Mathew

Delay in sanctions from NHAI, Railway

ALAPPUZHA: Slow but not yet steady could well be the slogan for the Rs.397-crore drinking water project for Cherthala Municipality that was announced more than three years back.

Though the project is to be commissioned by November 2008, only 10 per cent of the work has so far been completed. With no respite from monsoon rain, work has come to a standstill.

Being implemented in four simultaneous packages with help from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), the project envisages bringing water from the Muvattupuzha River through Kottayam and Ernakulam districts to Cherthala in Alappuzha district. Around 6.5 lakh people in Cherthala municipality and its surroundings were expected to benefit from the project, the water intake point of which is at Piravam.

The distribution network of the project is 660 km-long, while pipelines bringing water to the treatment plant at Thycautussery are around 22km-long. Nearly one kilometre of the pipelines will pass through the Vembanad lakebed.

The project, however, has been bogged down by delay in provision of sanctions from various departments, some with the Union Government. And these, sources point out, have delayed progress of the project.

While land acquisition in the three districts, 95 per cent of which is completed so far, had delayed the start, sanctions from the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), New Delhi, and the Indian Railway are yet to come.

The NHAI has given sanction for only 12.5 km of the 33.5-km stretch of pipelines along the NH-47. The approval for the rest of the stretch has been held up. Proposals for making NH-47 into a four-lane highway have blocked the progress of the project alongside the highway since the pipes can be laid only after these proposals are given a concrete shape, sources said.

Further, the pipelines have to pass underneath 17 railway crossings. Sanctions have been given to very few of these. “There are a lot of formalities for all these sanctions. A little bit of technical liaison and a little pressure from the State Government could go a long way in accelerating the project,” sources point out.

“There is no denying that there has been a slight delay. But we can not yet say that the project will not be completed before November 2008. We are trying our best,” JBIC’s project manager and executive engineer with the Kerala Water Authority, T. Rajendran told The Hindu.

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