Drinking water has not been the priority of the Kakinada Smart City initiative. Works pertaining to water supply have not been listed in the first phase of projects, and even in the second phase, the role of the Smart City Corporation is to take care of the quality control.
The civic body is one of the four partners working on the issue of supplying quality drinking water to all households through pipelines, while the other partners include the Union and the State governments and the Kakinada Municipal Corporation.
In a city with about one lakh dwellings and a population of 3.25 lakh, 44.75 MLD (million litres per day) of water is being supplied through a pipeline network spanning about 300 km. Against the requirement of 135 LPCD (litres per capita per day), the Kakinada Municipal Corporation is able to supply anything between 105 LPCD to 110 LPCD. Following a series of representations from various sections of people and the elected representatives seeking complete revival of the century-old water distribution system, the State government proposed to upgrade the network with possible funding from the World Bank.
Even as the works for chalking out a Detailed Project Report (DPR) were in progress, the city got selected for the Union government’s ‘Smart City’ project in the first phase, and the project document accorded top priority to improving education standards in the schools run by the civic body and improving sanitation in the radius of the Smart City, besides giving a facelift to the parks and easing traffic hurdles and improving civic amenities.
“Once the DPR is out, works pertaining to water supply will be distributed among the Union and the State governments, KMC and the Smart City Corporation. Under the Smart City initiative, we have a budgetary allocation of ₹23 crore for improving water supply, and what exactly we are going to do with this funding will be decided during the sharing of works,” explains J. Sujay Arun, Chief Executive Officer of the Kakinada Smart City Corporation.
The KMC, on the other hand, has been undertaking pipeline network extension works by spending the funds allocated under the Centre’s AMRUT scheme. Though the idea is to provide 20,000 new drinking water connections under the scheme, response from the households is lukewarm. “Many people are under the impression that drinking water should be provided free of cost and opting for a connection means shelling out money on monthly water bills,” said a senior official of the KMC, on the condition of anonymity.
The Smart City Corporation, however, is keen on mapping the pipeline network, digitising it and linking the same with control system architecture — the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) — for better monitoring of the supply network. “At present, it is taking one full day to plug repairs in the pipeline network. Once the mapping is done, the same can be reduced to three hours,” points out Mr. Arun.
