The drinking water scarcity in the silk city seems to be a never ending problem. Even after execution of the mega Janibilla Water Project though partially the problem was resolved, yet the State

Government has failed to come out with a permanent arrangement.The 40 wards under the BeMC circle and its adjoining areas aregrappling with the drinking water woes, come summer.

Experts and intellectuals contribute such misery to the lack ofineffective and unscientific distribution and management of water,while others consider poor supervision and maintenance of pipelinesresponsible for such chaos.

The routine maintenance and supervision of pipelines is completelynon-existent. The PHED seems to have no roadmap or mechanism at place to effectively check the profuse leakage of water in hundreds ofplaces in the city which goes unnoticed.

Even the repeated demandsmade by the public from time to time to check such leakages too go unheeded by the Engineers of the PHED because the Government neither makes any one accountable for such waste, nor takes exemplary action against the erring  engineers and  concerned supervisory staff. For instance, last month there was a huge leakage of water from theunderline pipes at multiple points in New Barracks Road where thewater was flowing on the road at 2 inch height for almost a week whichremained out of sight of the PHED authorities.

Significantly, the NewBarracks Street is considered by many as a VIP lane in which houses ofboth the present Speaker of Odisha Assembly Surjya Narayan Patro andhouse of former Deputy Speaker of OLA Rama Chandra Panda are located.Only when our correspondent drew the attention of local MLA BikramPanda, he immediately intervened and instructed the ExecutiveEngineer, PHED to mend the pipeline after which the line wasrectified.

Similarly, there are a number of places in the city wheresuch precious resource like water is being wasted as the concernedofficers do not proactively check and repair the leakage points whichis said to be one of the reasons for shortage of water in the city.

Similarly, there is a profuse leakage of water from the pipelines in Mahamayee Women’s College road, Gandhinagar 3rd Line (in front of the house of advocate Badri Das and Abhimanyu Mohanty and so on) and in several such places in the city. According to information available, there are a number of check posts and stand-posts in different parts of the city where the water is flowing openly like in a drain as their tap heads were removed. These can be considered only as a few indicators as to how the water supply in the silk city is left to the mercy of God.  Most importantly, there is no fixed time for supply of water to a particular line. Due to such ill management and negligence of the supervising staff and the contracting firm, the Government is unnecessarily defamed.

It may be mentioned here that, recently hundreds of residents of the district headquarters town Chhatrapur had complained that they were waiting for their turn to come through lottery in order to get a bucket of water.

Similarly, hundreds of women of Ganeshnagar of Ward-9 under BeMC circle with empty bucket in hand blocked the public road in protest here on Thursday demanding to resolve their drinkingn water problem.

According to the residents, their repeated demand for resolving drinking water issue before authorities for last two years remain unheeded. Only when JE PHED rushed to  spot and reportedly assured  agitating women that their problem would be solved within a week, agitators lifted from road blockade.

Likewise, residents of Pichpicha Nagar, Sriram Nagar, Khalasi Street and several such areas made similar such complaints earlier.