A group of Kolkatans went around the city over the past week to fix taps on stand-post hydrants from where water would flow down and get wasted.
The team of 15 volunteers visited Park Circus, Beckbagan, Ananda Palit Road, Moulali, Ripon Street and Joragirja among other places to fix the new taps. They divided themselves into two groups and hired two sets of plumbers for the job. They fixed about 100 taps between March 18 and 22.
Satnam Singh Ahluwalia, one of the men who did the job, said they had initially decided to put taps on only a handful of hydrants.
But once they started the work, local people led them to more places where the taps were either missing or needed replacement.
“In some places, water would flow down the drain because there was no tap and in others water kept leaking because the taps had broken. We did not anticipate such response from locals,” said Ahluwalia, the founder of IHA Foundation, an NGO that assembled the volunteers.
Ahluwalia said besides fixing the taps, the volunteers also wanted to raise awareness among people that fixing a tap was something that people can do on their own.
The Telegraph had earlier reported that a large volume of potable water gets wasted either because they flow down taps or overflows from filled reservoirs in homes.
Besides, there are many leaks in the underground water supply network, which is also responsible for water wastage, said officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
After water meters were installed in Cossipore around 2018 to check the water use pattern of households, stunning results came to the fore.
In a few houses where meter was installed, civic officials found the daily per capita consumption to be around 600 to 800 litres per person per day in some houses.