2 lakh illegal water connections in City, BWSSB traces 80,000

Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) chairman T M Vijay Bhaskar on Monday said the board, in a recent survey, has detected 80,000 households in the City with illegal water connections, and added that the number of actual illegal connections was more than two lakh.

In his keynote address at a conference on Water Loss, hosted by the International Water Association (IWA), Bhaskar said the board has issued notices to these households asking them to regularise water connections. “We will book criminal cases against them if they don’t,” he later told Deccan Herald without setting any deadline.

Referring to cities like Chandigarh and Jamshedpur which successfully brought down unaccounted for water (UAF), he said these cities have followed proper water distribution management. “If detecting leakage is a technical challenge, controlling illegal connections calls for public awareness and needs high level of political support. Illegal connections are mostly in slums, which means their regularisation affects the poor,” he said.

Bhaskar said 46 percent of the City’s water is not accounted for. Of the 1.4 billion litres pumped every day, about 600 MLD is unaccounted, he said.

“Besides, the board is exploring a new technique of leak detection using helium gas, invasive technologies like Smart Ball etc in improving our capacity to detect and reduce water losses,” Bhaskar said, and spoke about three major ongoing projects aimed to reduce UAF to the ambitious target of 16 pc, covering half of the City. These are in various stages of completion, he added.

Proposal before JICA

In addition to the existing project of replacing pipes, the chairman said the board has prepared a detailed project report (DPR) to bring down UAF - extending the project in three divisions: northern, eastern and southeastern parts of the City. This requires a grant of at least Rs 750 crore. “We are expecting a loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA),” he said.