Three units for bottling packaged drinking water in Rajarhat were found and sealed during a joint operation by the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and the Bidhannagar commisionerate on Sunday.

Plastic jars of 20-litre capacity would be filled with water and stickers of well-known brands allegedly pasted on them at the units.

The corporation had received several complaints about water shortage from residents who stay in and around Dashodrone and Swaraj Park in Rajarhat, a civic official said.

“We initially thought that our supply lines had choked because of sedimentation. A clean-up drive was conducted but the water woes continued,” the official said.

The residents then lodged a complaint with the councillor of Ward 5, Swati Banerjee. The councillor asked civic officials to conduct and probe the reason for water shortage.

“An inquiry revealed that there were three packaged drinking water bottling units in my ward. While two were operating out of Dashodrone, another was being run from a house in Swaraj Nagar. All the units had installed borewells and submersible pumps to draw groundwater quickly,” Banerjee said. “Twenty-litre jars would be bottled and pasted with stickers of well-known brands of packaged drinking water.”

The corporation lodged a police complaint and conducted a joint raid with police on Sunday. None of the operators of the units could furnish trade licences or permits for the borewells.

“All the borewells had been dug illegally. Permission has to be obtained from the district-level groundwater resources development authority and the state-level groundwater resources development authority for digging borewells under the West Bengal Groundwater Resources (Management, Control and Regulation) Act, 2005. The operators of the units could not furnish the permits,” Banerjee said.

Packaged drinking water units must get the water samples tested from a government-registered laboratory and display the findings prominently on their premises. No such certificate or analysis report could be found at the three units, an official said.

“We did not find any reports, only some filtration equipment. We will carry out checks on them as well,” said the official.

The units will remain shut till their owners can provide the required paperwork, an officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said.

“The civic body has given some time to produce the papers. We have taken several samples of the stickers that were used to be pasted on the jars to check whether there were any trademark infringements,” said the official.