Puri: India’s First City With 24×7 Drink From Tap Water

Puri: India’s First City With 24×7 Drink From Tap Water

While in many developed countries tap water is synonymous with drinking water, it still remains out of reach for Indians. Although we have water treatment facilities available across most of the towns and cities, it becomes contaminated due to leakages in the connecting pipes, maintenance and other issues. On Monday, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik inaugurated the ‘Sujal Drink From Tap Water Mission’ programme for Puri, the first city in India to achieve citywide ‘drink from tap’ water for 24 hours with 100 per cent metered household connections.

The initiative which has been launched by partnering with women self-help groups (SHGs) of Mission Shakti in community-led water supply management will benefit over 2.5 lakh people of Puri. The Jalsathi programme aims at water management for real-time water supply operations and quality surveillance. The quality surveillance of water supply will be done by ‘Jalsathis’ from the women SHGs.

Drinking water fountains will be installed at public places to discourage the use of plastic water bottles which will help eliminate 400 tonnes of plastic waste generated in the heritage city every year. ‘Drink from tap’ water to every home is similar to the water supply system in developed nations like the USA, England, Japan and Singapore. The project has been implemented in Puri under the 5Ts initiative of the state government.

Launching the scheme through a video conference in October last year, the CM had said the government would spend Rs 1300 crore to provide the drink directly from tap quality water to all households in urban areas to over 15 lakh people in 15 towns. The initiative was started at Salia Sahi in Bhubaneswar and Masani Chandi in Puri. In the first phase, safe and purified tap water was supplied to 12 pilot areas of Bhubaneswar and Puri, covering 1.8 lakh people.

The CM had announced that by March 2022, all 114 urban centres in the state will have 100 percent piped water connection. A statement said that the facility includes a 24/7 helpline centre with IVRS for grievance redressal, the inauguration of a mobile water testing laboratory and quick response team for rapid redressal of water supply complaints.