The Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning to install water meters in reservoirs and pumping stations to monitor the volume of water Salt Lake receives from the New Town water treatment plant.
Officials said they have an estimate of how much water they get from the plant, but there is no actual reading of the volume. The meters will help them get the actual reading.
According to estimates given by the public health engineering department and the New Town Kolkata Development Authority, which operates the treatment plant, Salt Lake receives 8-10 million gallons of water per day (MGD).
“We have an estimate of how much water we receive, but no actual figure. When we install the meters, we will get the actual figure. This will also tell us the loss in transmission,” said a BMC official.
Most blocks in the planned areas of Salt Lake receive treated water from the water treatment plant in New Town.
This water from the plant is sent to a pumping station near Central Park, from where a network of pipelines carries it, via nine smaller pumping stations, to two reservoirs near Tank 13 in IA Block and another beside Tank 5 near the Baisakhi island.
From these reservoirs, the water is distributed to more than 20,000 houses in Salt Lake.
There are 26,000 houses in the planned areas of Salt Lake, according to Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation figures. The 6,000 houses that do not get treated water still depend on groundwater.
“The Central Park pumping station and the reservoir beside Tank 5 already have water meters installed. We will install the meters in the other reservoirs and the pumping stations in phases,” said a BMC official.
The meters will be installed to measure the volume of water entering the reservoirs and the pumping stations and how much water is going out from there.
“The installation of meters will help us understand the amount of water received and the amount distributed in Salt Lake during all seasons,” said a senior official of the BMC’s water supply department.
Unlike other metro and tier I cities across the country, the civic authorities of Calcutta and Salt Lake do not collect any fee or tax for water.
Water meters were first introduced in 2017 in pockets of north Calcutta in order to read consumption patterns in these localities.
The pilot project showed that the average resident used up four times the national consumption benchmark. The national per capita consumption, calculated by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation, is 135 litres a day.
In 2021, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation installed water meters in houses in five wards in Kasba, Jadavpur and Patuli to prevent wastage.