2018 saw no water in city areas on 54 days

Nagpur: Residents of Nagpur had a difficult time last year due to frequent shutdowns undertaken by Orange City Water Limited (OCW). The company undertook 54 shutdowns which deprived the whole of city or parts of it of water in 2018. It has claimed that in all instances shutdowns were inevitable. The company is not directly informing its consumers about shutdowns, which puts them to inconvenience.
OCW has attributed various reasons for the shutdowns. “In 24 instances, the reasons were planned shutdown for interconnections, valve change, flow meter change, water treatment plant (WTP) maintenance work and other technical work by MSEDCL or SNDL. There were eight emergency breakdowns like major leakages repairing. Parts of city went without water sixteen time due to overhead tank cleaning, leakages repairing and maintenance in tank supply areas. Six times shutdowns were caused due to MahaMetro or NHAI doing pipeline shifting,” said spokesperson Sachin Dravekar.

Dravekar said that OCW tried to minimize the impact of shutdowns. “In overhead tank cleaning, water supply was not available between 9am and 6pm only in the affected areas. During emergency shutdowns, water supply in only feeder line areas got affected. In WTP maintenance work or power breakdowns, water supply in some zones got affected while rest of city received water as per schedule,” he added.

Commenting on steps taken to reduce the number of shutdowns, the spokesperson said that OCW carried out many leakage plugging works during a single shutdown. “Once seven leakages were plugged on various lines on a single day. We go in for planned shutdowns after morning hours water supply so that affected areas have minimum impact. Most of the times, we club WTP maintenance work with leakages plugging,” he further said.

Dravekar claimed that consumers were indirectly informed well in advance about the shutdowns. “In case of planned shutdowns, we issue press releases to all newspapers, FM radio channels and cable channels three days before the planned shutdown. In case of emergency breakdowns, media is sent SMS and WhatsApp messages,” he said.

However, OCW does not bother to directly inform the consumers. It has 3.40 lakh consumers, of which 2.90 lakh have submitted their mobile numbers. The company, unlike MSEDCL, does not send SMSes to them. SMSes are sent to them only in case of individual complaints.

Direct communication is done in case of government hospitals, railways and bulk consumers. The corporators and MLAs are given prior information about shutdowns either through letters or WhatsApp messages.

Activist Anil Wadpalliwar flayed OCW for not sending SMSes. “The company should not think about saving money at the cost of inconvenience to consumers. Newspapers rarely publish news about the shutdowns,” he said.