Contamination points and leakages in the Delhi Jal Board’s nearly 14,000-km network will be resolved within six months, making the tap water supplied to households safe to drink, DJB chairperson Kapil Mishra said on Thursday.
Mr. Mishra announced a new campaign called “Walk the Line”, that would include about 3,500 DJB employees, including 800 junior engineers, surveying the entire piped network over the next 45 days. The engineers will look for leaks in the network, contamination points at household-level, and problems with valves and underground reservoirs. “This city-wide exercise will be largest such initiative by any water utility in the world. Once the problems areas are identified, we will go about repairing and replacing the infrastructure,” he said.
The points of contamination and leakage will be put in a centralised database, which help senior engineers to draw up plans. An overall action plan for the whole city would be prepared, he said.
The work would be carried out in six months, after which a comprehensive plan to maintain quality would be in place. The city would be divided into 1,010 district metering areas (DMAs), which would have leak detection units monitored by chief engineers. DJB CEO Keshav Chandra said 903 million gallons per day (MGD) of water is supplied around Delhi currently, but there is no information on where it all goes.
This isn’t the DJB’s first experiment with DMAs. Certain colonies were selected for PPP projects and DMAs were proposed about two years ago. DJB Member (water supply) R.S. Tyagi said at Geetanjali colony near Malviya Nagar the water usage had gone down from 300 litres per capita per day (lpcd) to 200 lpcd, after the DMA was set up.
