There might be some respite for the added area residents from the impact of unequal water distribution. And they might get the relief before summer 2022 as the Coimbatore Corporation plans to study and rectify problems in the distribution.
The Corporation sources said it had started studying the problem after Minister for Electricity V. Senthilbalaji had announced that the civic body would be taking steps to reduce the gaps in water supply distribution by bringing down the supply cycle from once in nine days to once in two days.
Consequent upon the announcement, Corporation Commissioner Raja Gopal Sunkara had asked Suez India Pvt. Ltd. to study the present water supply situation and suggest steps to be taken to improve distribution.
Mr. Sunkara said of the ways to improve water distribution one was to augment source – having more water supply sources and the other was to improve distribution. The Corporation had enough water sources to supply to the city, including the added areas and in the immediate future there would be no problem, what with the Pilloor III project making progress.
The Corporation, therefore, decided to focus on improving distribution and to start doing so it wanted to how much water was going where. To do so, it had asked Suez India Pvt. Ltd., which was already taking care of water distribution maintenance in 60 wards in the core city, to study the situation in added area.
The company engineers studied the distribution to discover that the deficit in supply to the added area residents varied from 5% during monsoon seasons to 15% during summer. The Corporation was supposed to supply each resident 135 litres a day.
In a few places in the added areas, the Corporation supplied water at 50 litres a person a day and in a few others 250 litres a person a day.
The second problem was that there were no flow meters to assess how much water the Corporation was pumping to the local, neighbourhood water distribution tanks. And, there were no meters either for the tanks to which the Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Distribution Board (TWAD Board) supplied water.
The company, the sources said, therefore suggested to the Corporation to install electromagnetic, automatic flow meters at the entry points of all the local distribution tanks in the added areas, spread over 40 wards.
The Corporation would be spending around ₹5.36 crore to install over 100 such meters.
The sources said the installation of the meters would enable the civic body to monitor water supply on a real-time basis as the meters would be transmitting data to the dashboard at the Corporation.
Once the Corporation had this data on hand, it would be able to set right the distribution or take remedial measures wherever necessary, the sources added.
