The laying of an 18-km pipeline network that will supply raw water from the Hooghly to a treatment plant on the southern fringes of the city will be complete by the end of the year, officials in the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) said.

The pipeline will carry the raw water from Bhoot Ghat in Garden Reach to a water treatment plant in Sonarpur’s Pyarabagan.

The construction of an intake jetty at Bhoot Ghat in Garden Reach is complete. The water treatment plant in Sonarpur is also ready and once the laying of the pipeline is complete, the plant will start functioning.

The potable water will be supplied across 35 wards of the Rajpur-Sonarpur Municipality, parts of which especially areas neighbouring Calcutta, have witnessed rapid urbanisation over the last decade.

Large apartments have sprung up in these places. Residents of some of these apartments said almost all the water they consume is drawn from underground using high-capacity pumps.

“We will be able to commission the project by the end of this year,” said an official of KMDA, the state government agency that is executing the project.

A drive down the stretch of EM Bypass between the Dhalai bridge and Kamalgazi, and then along the Southern Bypass will show multiple housing complexes on two sides of the road.

The demand for potable water rose and supply could not keep pace with the rise in demand. These places will benefit from the commissioning of the water treatment plant.

A resident of Sunny Seasons, a housing society near the Kamalgazi crossing, said that its residents depended on underground water for their daily needs.

“The quality of the water we consume is very poor. We have to change the filter of our water purifiers frequently. Some of the residents delay the change of filter and buy water from some local suppliers at ₹40 per 20 litre,” said the resident.

He added he was not sure whether the 20-litre containers had potable water or untreated water. “People consume it with the belief that it is potable water,” he added.

A woman who stays in a housing complex in Narendrapur echoed him.

“The expense behind plumbers is very high in our complex as the water lines inside our housing complex get choked within a few months. The underground water
has a high iron content. We have to clean our overhead tanks every three months,” she said.

The woman said they have been hearing about potable water supply from the municipality for quite a few years and are hoping that the supply begins soon.

The construction of the water treatment plant — with a capacity to produce 124 million litre of potable water every day — began in 2017.

It was part of the first phase of the project which also included the construction of elevated service stations, underground reservoirs and a distribution network. The first phase cost ₹227 crore.

The second phase, which began a few months before Covid, includes the laying of the 18-km pipeline to carry the raw water, the construction of a 40 million gallon-a-day intake jetty at Bhoot Ghat and a few more elevated service stations among others. It cost ₹349 crore.