‘Dirty’ drinking water won’t affect people’s health: PHED

Jaipur: The contaminated water supplied to a few localities of Jaipur for a few days this week will not have any adverse impact on the health of residents, said the public health engineering department (PHED) in a statement on Saturday.
Officials said the water supplied through PHED pipelines did not have any bad smell and that it had only developed a yellowish-brown colour. The colour contamination in the water was below the permissible limit set by Bureau of Indian Standard (BIS), they said.
“Acting on complaints from a few residents and instructions from the PHED minister, we decided to collect samples from a few localities and sent them to the main laboratory in Jaipur. Tests revealed that the worst quality of the water samples had a colour contamination of a little less than 14 hegen units. BIS has set a permissible limit of 14 hegen unit. Consuming the water will not have any impact on the health of residents,” said a senior PHED official.
A fresh sample of the water was sent to the laboratory on Friday night and tests revealed that the colour contamination had come down to around 4 hegen units, said the official. The colour contamination of drinking water in Jaipur households normally remains around 4 to 5 hegen units, he added.
On Thursday, residents from localities in and around MD Road, C Scheme and Bapu Nagar complained about receiving dirty water. Residents of Saraswati Marg and Radha Marg had also raised similar complaints a few days back.
“Acting on these complaints, we decided to test water samples collected from strategic localities across the city. We conducted tests on samples collected from 450 places across the city. The results showed that the water was not harmful,” said the official. However, PHED officials are clueless about the causes of the colour contamination. They have started a probe to find out the possible reasons and prevent such a crisis in future.
“Water problem in the affected localities have been sorted out since Friday evening. We hope this problem will not recur,” said councillor Jitendra Srimali, who had lodged a complaint with PHED on Thursday.