It is no fallacy that nearly 40 per cent Cauvery water does not reach Bangalore’s homes, being lost as it course through a maze of old leaky pipelines, or through unauthorised connections. Now Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) has partnered with IBM and Indian Institute of Science to monitor how and where this precious drinking water is wasted. At 219 critical junctions in the water transmission lines, the Board has installed ultrasonic flow meters linked to an IBM-designed dashboard to capture the rate of flow.
The software converts the data into a geo-spatial visual map to help BWSSB engineers to better monitor water flow and distribution, and to even get an alert when water thresholds are not met in any area. In a paper published earlier this week in the international journal Procedia Engineering, representatives of the three organisations describe their initiative as “a roadmap to provide a state-of-the-art water management system to Bangalore.”
Co-author and official in BWSSB’s IT initiatives division, P.N. Ravindra told
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The supply drawn from the four stages of the Cauvery water supply scheme is notoriously inadequate to meet the exponentially growing demand in Bangalore. But by incorporating a ‘smart’ network such as this, BWSSB could save both water and revenue, said Amit Merchant of IBM, a co-author.
According to the paper, this software helps the Board allocate water equally per connection, curb theft and wastage, and monitor the 55 ground-level reservoirs through which water is supplied to Bangalore. Eventually, “for Bangalore city our goal is to provide information to the workforce on their mobile phones, integrate more instrumentation [and] help BWSSB create benchmarks for valve timings and settings, triggering alarms when valve timings and settings are violated,” it adds.