Nearly one-third of the work in the construction of the sewage treatment plant (STP) in Nanjundapuram is complete, says the Coimbatore Corporation.
Legal issue
The Corporation began the construction sometime in August-September this year for the ₹ 43.60-crore project, which was delayed because of it entering into a legal tangle with two residents’ welfare association.
The long drawn out battle saw it lose precious time and a part of the resources it had invested. By the time it emerged out of the battle, it had spent around ₹ 17 crore of the proposed investment of ₹ 33.79 crore.
The Corporation then engaged an expert team to assess how much of the investment it could salvage, what modifications were necessary for those and what it needed to add to comply with the National Green Tribunal order.
The Corporation says it is rising the height of the compound on the north and east of the 6.24-acre site, installing high-power diesel generators, shifting two of the several tanks used in treating the waste and equipping the plant with the devices necessary to continuously transmit to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board headquarters the air quality data from the site.
Trial run
The work is progressing as per schedule and by December 2020, the Corporation hopes to take the plant to the trial-run stage.
The Corporation commissioning the plant does not mean immediate availability of the underground sewer service to one-third of the city’s residents.
Connections
It says once the plant is ready for commercial run, it will then have to start giving house service connections to the residents of those wards who will be serviced by the Nanjundapuram treatment plant.
As per the Corporation’s underground drainage project proposal, the Nanjundapuram plant will serve nearly 20,000 residents in Ramanathapuram, Pappanaickenpudur, Avarampalayam, Gandhipuram, Ganapathy, Sanganoor and a few other areas.
This work, the Corporation estimates, will take a year or more and perhaps by 2021 the residents will get to benefit from the underground sewer service.
The Corporation took up the underground drainage project at around ₹ 120 crore in 2011 under the then Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.
