Study to implement 24x7 drinking water supply project begins

Civic body to replace distribution pipelines for over 1,000 km.

The study to implement to the 24x7 drinking water supply project in the core city area – 60 wards – has begun.

According to officials in the Coimbatore Corporation, Suez Project Pvt. Ltd., the company that won the contract, has approached the National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, for satellite images of the city.

It has also asked the Corporation the details and diagrams of its existing water distribution network – pipeline drawings, location of over-head tanks, number of connections and water charges collected.

Even as it collected the data, the company’s teams would go around the city, collecting details from each household, commercial and industrial establishment that consumed water. Once it collected the satellite images, the company would also verify the details on the ground.

With all those data, the company would prepare the hydraulic network analysis (HNA), which like the human DNA mapping, would have all the details associated with the city’s water supply.

For instances, if the Corporation were to click on a building image on the computer, the HNA would give the exact location, where it received the water from, the number of occupants, water charges paid and the nearest over-head water tank.

In short, the HNA was a combination of geographical information system and management information system, the sources added.

With the HNA, the company would prepare the capital investment plan before embarking on the work on the ground.

As part of its study, the company would also take up in-depth pilot study in R.S. Puram, Bharathi Park and Ramalingam Colony so as to study the actual distribution, the quantity of water supplied, the possible challenges it could face in studying the entire city.

The sources said that as part of the 24x7 drinking water supply project, the Corporation would build 29 water tanks to take the total tanks for water distribution to 63. It would also replace existing feeder mains (pipeline from one tank to another) for over 100 km and distribution pipelines for over 1,000 km.