TS Water Grid: Govt to charge users HYDERABAD: Every drop of water supplied through the Water Grid project will be counted and the government will collect money from the users for the same.
Officials will use flow meters and sensors to count the water supplied to every village. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if any villager complains that they received water only for some time, the officials will show how much water was supplied to that particular village.
The second reason is that the government is planning to tap external borrowings for the Water Grid project, which will ensure safe drinking water to all households by providing taps to all houses.
If the State goes for borrowings, the funding agency wants to know the cost-benefit ratio. So, the water supplied through water grid will be counted and the money for the same will be collected from the people. In some states, the charges collected from water users is around `100. The TS government is yet to fix the water cess tariff.
According to sources in Panchayat Raj department, the government is planning to tap loans from Korean Water Grid, Canada Pension Fund and JAICA. Officials will present detailed project report of one sub-water grid to the funding agencies.
Meanwhile, during a discussion on Water Grid project recently, chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao suggested a major change in the design of the project.
Instead of tapping Krishna water at three different sources, including Jurala and Nagarjuna Sagar projects, the Chief Minister suggested to the officials to tap Krishna water at Srisaialam at Yellore.
The water tapped at Yellore will be lifted to a nearby hillock and stored in a tank on the hillock. From that tank, water will be supplied to four districts through four pipelines to Gadwal, Kodangal, Parigi, Nalgonda and Warangal. Representatives visited Yellore recently. 'The Korean team too gave some ideas on the Yellore project site,' an official in the PR department said.
Meanwhile, DPRs of six water grids of Karimnagar, Medak, Nalgonda, Mahbubnagar, Khammam and Adilabad will be readied by this month-end. Each grid costs around `1,500 crore.
News Posted: 20 December, 2014
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