A 10 million gallon water reservoir was inaugurated adjacent to the Garden Reach waterworks on Wednesday.

The reservoir will help increase the supply to areas south of Bhowanipore that receive potable water from the Garden Reach plant.

The plant can produce 185 million gallons of water every day, but there is only one 29 million gallon capacity reservoir to stock water. The new reservoir will start functioning from Thursday; it will increase the storage capacity, a civic engineer said.

Rashbehari Avenue, Gariahat, Golpark, Ballygunge, and parts of Kasba and Jadavpur receive potable water from the Garden Reach waterworks. All these places will benefit, the engineer said. “We can now supply water more efficiently. The demand changes with season... the demand is more in the mornings. The additional water in the reservoir can be diverted to areas where demand is more.”

A reservoir is required to store the water that is produced during lean periods when the demand is less. “The demand is always less at night. But if we have more storage capacity, we can go on producing water at night that can then be thrust into the supply network in the morning. This will increase the pressure of the flow and take water to pockets that face water shortage now,” the engineer said.

Mainak Mukherjee, the chief engineer of the CMC’s water supply department, said the operation of the new reservoir would be completely automated. “There will be minimal human interference. Chances of errors will reduce because of automation. The system will give alerts in case there is any abnormality in any component and this will help address the problem faster.”

Firhad Hakim, the chairperson of CMC’s board of administrators, inaugurated the reservoir.