Officials from the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) has prepared summer action plan with a budget of about ₹3.16 crore to mitigate water woes in the city. Recently, Mayor G. Hari Venkata Kumari has accorded sanction for the amount with which the Engineering Department and the water supply wing will be taking up the works.
GVMC Chief Engineer M. Venkateswara Rao said that as part of the action plan the civic body will be taking up 44 works.
Giving the details, he said that civic body will spend ₹57.92 lakh to hire additional water tankers and deploy them to those areas facing water shortage. An amount of ₹1.47 crore will be spent on creation of new borewells and ₹12. 30 lakh will be spent on repairs of borewells. An amount of ₹25.94 lakh will be spent for repairs of water treatment plants and ₹46.80 lakh will be spent on laying new pipelines as well as replacing the old ones. He said that ₹10 lakh has been earmarked for repairing pumpsets and ₹7.40 lakh would be spent for desiltation of infiltration wells. Similarly, the GVMC will be spending about ₹4.40 lakh for pipeline leakage works.
According to Superintending Engineer (Water Supply) K. Venugopal, the GVMC has 34 water tankers. “In addition, we are hiring 19 more water tankers. All these tankers will take up 110 additional trips during the summer,” he added.
“There are 8,176 borewells in the GVMC limits. As part of summer action plan, we will be digging 123 more borewells,” he said.
“During the year 2017, some areas in the city have reported drinking water supply issues. Major reservoirs in the city had dried up and we had to pump water from Yeleru. Areas like Madhurawada, Bheemili and a few city outskirts areas have faced water shortage. Water supply was given once in two days for some areas,” he said. “Since the last two years, we have been receiving copious rains, water levels in all the reservoirs in the district are at good levels and we may not see any water supply issue this year,” Mr. Venugopal said.
Published - March 24, 2021 01:11 am IST
