The State government has decided to rope in the services of cooperative bodies for setting up and maintenance of reverse osmosis (RO) plants to provide clean drinking water in rural areas suffering from contaminated groundwater.
At a meeting with the government here on Tuesday, representatives of the cooperative sector offered to lend a helping hand in setting up and maintenance of 2,050 RO plants, according to an official. The government has decided to set up 4,000 such plants this year and district-level tenders have been floated.
The government is considering a financial model under which it would provide a grant of Rs. 5 lakh for each plant while the remaining money would have to be sourced from cooperatives and the MP’s and MLA’s Local Area Development Funds. Each RO plant would cost about Rs. 8 lakh.
The main intention behind the plan to involve the cooperative sector is to ensure people’s participation in setting up and maintenance of these plants so that there will be a sense of collective responsibility as well as ownership, which would lead to effective use of these resources, the official said.