Nagpur Municipal Corporation to set up mineral water bottling plant

NAGPUR: Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) is all set to start its own bottling plant for packaged water. A brainchild of mayor Dayashankar Tiwari, the civic body aims to generate additional revenue with this venture.
The proposal got nod at the Nagpur Environmental Services Limited (NESL) board meeting on Monday. “To lessen the dependency on ever-constrained conventional sources of income, NMC has come up with a blueprint with finer details still being worked out to give the Orange City safe drinking bottled mineral water at affordable rates,” the mayor told TOI while confirming the development.
The bottling plant will come up at Kanhan water treatment plant under private public partnership model, and is in the tendering stage.
Tiwari said it will be the responsibility of the firm to promote and publicize the bottled water as NMC may fall short of resources in marketing it. The mayor said NMC will provide 1 litre water bottle at half the market price. Though NMC has not decided the name of the product, we may name it as NANEE (Nagpur Neer), the mayor said.
A senior official from NMC said the public health engineering department is finalizing the tender document and it will be floated soon. The civic body has not yet estimated the capital cost to be incurred in the project.
Sources, however, said NMC will face stiff opposition from the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority (MWRRA). It had already raised objections over the civic body’ supplying domestic water to commercial units, including Indian Railways, Airport Authority of India and restaurants.
As per MWRRA condition, NMC is drawing water from two sources — Navegaon Khairi and Kanhans — for domestic purposes, while it is also providing water to commercial consumers. MWRRA had advised the civic body to revive its existing water bodies in the city to meet its commercial demands.
MWRRA had already identified around 11,000 commercial users and institutions to whom NMC is supplying water by levying commercial rates, sources from the MWRRA said.
NMC is supplying potable water to around 3.73 lakh consumers which included 10,988 commercial and institutional consumers. It levies Rs8.15 per unit water from domestic consumers, while for institutional and commercial consumers, the rate varies from Rs21.17 to Rs97.74 per unit.
For lifting raw water from Navegaon Khairi and Kanhan rivers, NMC pays Rs12 crore to the irrigation department.
When TOI brought this to the notice of the mayor, he clarified that if MWRRA says so, NMC will won’t mind paying additional charges to the latter.