The civic body has woken up to the need to properly de-silt and maintain Kanke, Hatia and Getalsud dams, the mainstay of water supply to 32 lakh people in Ranchi.
The Ranchi Municipal Corporation is set to write to the state government to ask for funds from the Centre for this mammoth task.
According to protocol, once the state forwards RMC’s request with a recommendation to release funds, the Centre will send an inspection team to each of these dam sites to assess the need for de-silting and then decide on the quantum of funds.
De-silting, which has never been properly done in each of these dams throughout the decades of their existence — Kanke (also Gonda) dam was built in 1955, Hatia (also Dhurwa) dam in 1962-63 and Getalsud (also Rukka) dam in 1971 — is vital for the health and water-bearing capacity of any large reservoir.
Deputy mayor Sanjeev Vijayvargiya told this paper that the RMC was not aware of how to obtain funds to de-silt dams.
But now, the RMC was treating this as a priority, he said. “A detailed report on the dams is likely to be given to the state government by the end of this month. The Centre releases funds for de-silting and expansion of big reservoirs. We have started working in advance so that the RMC definitely gets central funds (for the de-silting of these dams) in the next financial year,” Vijayvargiya said.
An official of the Gonda division of water resources department said de-silting of these dams was urgently required to increase their water retention capacity.
“In 2016, when Ranchi had witnessed a major water crisis, chief minister Raghubar Das had ordered the Kanke reservoir be deepened. Accordingly, digging on the parched land of the dam had been undertaken on a large scale. In October last year, then chief secretary Sudhir Tripathi during a review meeting had admitted that the catchment area of Kanke dam has shrunk, with encroachment and silting being the main reasons,” he said.
Getalsud dam, the largest of all the three reservoirs with a catchment area of 717sqkm designed for, both domestic and industrial use, was also not de-silted. In 2012, then Jharkhand State Electricity Board (before its unbundling) had mooted a proposal to de-silt the dam but it had never materialised.
