BWSSB cuts apartment water rates, PG sanitary charges

Bengaluru: The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) which had revised the water tariff in April after nearly a decade has now reduced the tariffs only for apartments and Paying Guest accommodations. 

According to an order accessed by DH, the calculation of tariff for apartments is now based on the number of houses in the apartment complex. Earlier, BWSSB was only considering the amount of water consumed and the tariff would increase since higher consumption would mean that the apartment complexes would fall in the higher slabs. Many apartment residents had argued that the slabs were arbitrary and had not considered the number of houses in the complex.

With the new revision, majority of the apartment complexes in the city are expected to receive lower bills. However, for apartments with less than 200 houses, the water bill is expected to increase since a new slab revision has been introduced. “Earlier, the slabs were fixed and it did not consider the number of apartments. Hence, we had requested the BWSSB to consider the number of houses in the apartment complex while fixing the tariff. This will help many apartments. Only bigger apartment complexes with over 2,000 houses might get higher bills,” explained Arun Kumar from the Bangalore Apartments' Federation (BAF).

With the revision, each family in the apartment is expected to get 200 litres per day and this is charged at a lower rate of Rs 32 per kilo litre. If the consumption exceeds beyond this, the tariff increases to Rs 55 per kilo litre.

In April, when the BWSSB revised its tariff, The sanitary charges for the Paying Guest (PG) accommodations has increased drastically and the PG owners had then appealed to the BWSSB to relook at the decision. Owing to the demands, BWSSB has now slashed down the sanitary charges for PGs by more than 50%. For instance, PGs which can accommodate more than 20 rooms had to pay sanitary charges of Rs 7,500 after the April revision and this has now been slashed to Rs 3,000. Before the revision in April, the sanitary charges were fixed at Rs 1,000. “While we agree that the water tariff had to be increased since it was not revised for over a decade, the revision of the sanitary charges came as a shock for us. In April, after the revision, the sanitary charges were increased by five to seven times and this was a burden on the owners. Hence, we requested that the BWSSB reduce at least the sanitary charges and we are happy that they have considered our request,” said Aruna Kumar D T, President, P G Owner's Welfare Association.