Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

KWA plans regulated supply of water in city

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Water Authority (KWA) has begun work on a multi-crore project to regulate on a rota basis the supply of drinking water to different distribution zones in the city.

The Rs.13-crore project involves preparing a detailed GIS-aided map of the pipelines in the city’s distribution system, a total isolation of the pipelines in the Observatory zone, the Thirumala zone and the low-lying zone and the installation of valves at different points in the distribution network. The GIS-aided maps would help the KWA to get a correct picture on the distribution lines that criss-cross the city and also to identify the points where lines feeding one zone inter-connect with those feeding another zone. The identification and termination of these inter-connections are essential pre-requisites for the isolation of the distribution zones.

Once the zones are isolated and the valves are in place, the KWA would begin to supply water to each zone for three days in a week. In other words, while one zone is being given water, no other zone would be serviced. Right away this would lead to a quantum jump in the water pressure in the distribution lines of the zone being serviced on any given day. The crucial weakness of the present 24 by 7—in theory the capital city gets water round-the-clock—is that while many areas in the city get water on all days, there are areas that do not get water for days on end. A zone-wise restriction of water supply would, at one stroke, remove this imbalance.

It is the KWA’s calculation that when the ‘always on’ drinking water situation comes to an end, the usage patterns of the city’s residents too would change. “We hope that when people get water only for two or three days, a conservation culture too would set in,” a KWA engineer involved in formulating this scheme says.

When additional water is produced at Aruvikkara as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and the Japan Bank of International Cooperation-aided schemes, this regulated water supply would actually create a water surplus for the capital city. “Once there is a surplus of water in our reservoirs, there would be no disruption of water supply even if there is stoppage in pumping for a few hours on a day. If there are power outages or if a pumping main bursts, the city’s water supply will not be affected,” the engineer says.

As part of this scheme, the government would also have to give an official nod to the storage of water in sumps in houses, commercial establishments and in apartment complexes. While apartments already have sumps, not every house has one. Moreover, there would also have to be a regulation specifying the size of the sump in relation to factors including the size of a family, the number of apartments in a high-rise building and so on.

“We would find the money for this project partly from the JBIC-aided scheme and the JNNURM scheme,” Managing Director of KWA Suresh Babu says. “We are moving to such a system of regulated supply of drinking water in Thiruvananthapuram. That is for sure,” he says.

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