The Water Supply Board is spending thousands of crores of rupees to bring additional water to Hyderabad from the phase-I of Godavari and the phase-III of the Krishna project. Despite this, it has failed to put in place an effective mechanism to check the huge quantities of water that is going unaccounted for.
Officials admit that over 160 million gallons of the total 340 million gallons of water supplied every day is going unaccounted. This means, nearly 50 per cent of the total daily supplies are not giving a single penny to the Water Board, which is spending Rs 3,375 crore to execute the Godavari phase-I and another Rs 1,700 crore on getting water from the Krishna phase-III.
The Water Board supplies 340 MGD daily in the city, but collects bills for only 180 MGD water. As per the revised tariff slabs, the Board should get over Rs 80 crore in monthly bill collections for 342 MGD water supplied per day in the city. However, it is getting Rs 50- 52 crore per month. The unaccounted for water is due to leakages and wastage resulting from old pipelines, the illegal tapping of water from the main pipelines, the lack of monitoring of public stand posts (public taps), meterless and illegal water connections, besides supplies to religious and charitable institutions like temples and mosques.
There are only 1.20 lakh connections in the city which have meters, and bills are issued based on the water supplied to these connections. For the remaining connections (non-metered), it is a minimum bill of less than Rs 220 per month, even though they consume water three times more than the minimum monthly bill. The total water connections in the city is 7.50 lakh connections. Water Board in-charge director (technical) Sundar Ram Reddy admitted that over 40 per cent of the total water supplied daily was going unaccounted, but hastened to say that every step was being taken to check this wastage.
“We are taking measures such as installation of meters to all the connections individual, institutional, public stand posts and other consumers so that there is an account of water being supplied to each connection,” he stated. Mr Reddy explained: “Our priority is to measure the water and subsequently concentrate on billing.”