It prides itself as the country’s second municipality set up in 1866, which became a corporation this July. But the Machilipatnam Municipal Corporation (MMC) continues to struggle to provide assured drinking water forcing people to make do with barely half the required per capita per day.
In fact, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO) mandates Municipal Corporations to guarantee supply of 135 litres per capita per day, for drinking and other essential requirements.
"We are able to provide 70 litres of water per capita per day. We are struggling to supply 14 million litres per day to the over 46,000 households as against the daily requirement of 22 million litres," MMC Engineer (Water Supply) P. Trinadha Rao told The Hindu. This is against the stipulated 135-Litres-Per-Capita-Per-Day which is supposed to be spent including for drinking (3 litres), cooking (4), bathing (20), toilets (40), washing clothes (25), and cleaning utensils (20), according to the CPHEEO.
The port town with its 1.7 lakh population depends solely on surface water sources - mostly river Krishna - as groundwater contains huge levels of salinity.
Tanks undependable
The Krishna river channel - Wood Water Channel - and the 3,300 million litres capacity Summer Storage Tank (SST) at Tarakaturu are the prime surface sources from where water is purified and supplied by the corporation. However, the SST is also a drinking water source for Machilipatnam rural, Pedana Municipality and Guduru mandal covering 25 villages.
"The Wood Water Channel at Akamarru Lock is purely meant to divert the water for the Machilipatnam civic body. However, it goes dry most of the year, forcing us to abandon it. Given the absence of surface water around the year, we are helpless in meeting the water needs from early Summer," added Mr. Trinadha Rao. From January-March, the MMC manages to supply drinking water twice or thrice a week until the monsoon arrives.
AMRUT, the life giver
But there’s some good news. Construction of two plants - 3 MGD (million gallons per day) purification plant and 20 MLD purification and treatment plants - are in progress under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) Scheme.
According to MMC, the Construction of 10 new reservoirs with 9,070 kg/litre storage capacity is in the progress under the AMRUT scheme, 13th and 14th Finance Commissions’grants. "At least 80% of their construction has been completed. The remaining has been delayed owing to financial issues," said Mr. Trinadha Rao.
By the year-end, the MMC is gearing up to complete laying 25 km length of drinking water pipelines for the water supply, for which it has already laid a 72-km pipeline, which is in operation. Ironically, barely 28,000 households have individual drinking water connections as against the above 46,000 households.
Question mark over quality
Where there’s a scarcity, there will be an entrpreneur to cash on. Every ward in the town has a private water purification plant, many of them run sans quality standards in the absence of vigil. "Less than 10% of the plants thriving in the MMC meet the quality standards. A Public Interest Litigation has been accepted by the local court on the illegal and unsafe water trade practices in Machilipatnam and is under trial," a leading local lawyer Lankisetti Balaji said.
