Almost two years after starting work on the 24x7 drinking water supply project to revamp drinking water distribution in the old city area – 60 wards – the Coimbatore Corporation has made very little progress.
The Corporation sources familiar with the project said the civic body had only completed 10% of the total work. This meant that the Corporation had replaced only pipeline for 170 km of the 1,700 km. By December 2020, the Corporation should have completed at least 320 km.
Even the 170 km pipeline that the Corporation had laid, it had not completed work in any area, the sources said, explaining that the civic body that had divided the project area in 60 wards into 102 district metering areas had not completed work in even one of those.
Even as the pipeline laying work by digging roads was getting delayed, the Corporation explored the possibility of constructing at least a few of the 32 overhead tanks or service reservoirs proposed under the project.
The reason that the Corporation wanted the tank construction to take priority was that it was not on roads and therefore required very little inter-department coordination for traffic management.
But even this work had not taken off, as expected, the sources conceded and added that the Corporation had renewed tank construction on a priority and would very soon take up construction of six tanks.
The reasons that the Corporation sources attributed for the delay were the slow start of the project, the COVID-19 lockdown affecting the arrival of pipelines and other materials and, the return of labourers.
Now the Corporation had asked the contractor executing the project – Suez India Pvt. Ltd. – to double the number of labourers so that the pace of execution improved.
The contractor, as per the agreement signed with the Corporation, was supposed to complete the pipeline laying and tank construction work in four years, by 2023.