Houses as well as water tanks in all three sectors of Salt Lake will be fitted with water meters by Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation.
The aim of this move is to find out exactly how much water the township requires, a civic body official said.
A pilot project will be launched where the meters will be fitted to different water tanks across the township to find out how much water is being distributed. Meters have already been fitted at tank No. 5 as part of the first phase, the official added.
In the second stage, a survey will be conducted in various houses as well apartment complexes. There too water meters will be fixed on their supply lines to find out how much water is being used daily.
Mayor Krishna Chakraborty said they wanted to check the wastage of filtered water. “We will start the programme in Salt Lake before moving it to the added areas as well,” she said.
Salt Lake gets around 8 million gallons of water per day (MGD) from the New Town water treatment plant.
The water requirement for the township during summers has been estimated at around 11 MGD, another official said. So, the supply from New Town is mixed with groundwater to meet this requirement.
Kolkata is the only major city in India that still supplies filtered potable water for free.
Water meters were first introduced in 2017 in pockets of north Kolkata in order to read consumption patterns in these localities.
The pilot project showed that the average resident uses up four times the national consumption benchmark. The national per capita consumption, calculated by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation, is 135 litre a day.
In 2021, Kolkata Municipal Corporation had started a similar initiative where water meters had been installed in houses of five wards in Kasba, Jadavpur and Patuli to prevent wastage and divert water that is being wasted in one neighbourhood to another that faces a crisis.
Both the exercises were done at the insistence of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that had pumped in funds to modernise the water supply system in the city.
In Salt Lake, a civic official pointed out that many households were using the filtered water supplied to them to wash multiple cars.
In addition to this, the official said they have found out that several residential houses as well as ceremonial establishments have installed high powered pumps into the water line to augment their supply because of which supply to the other houses is getting affected.
Salt Lake is still dependent on an ageing water supply pipeline network and leaks spring up pretty regularly.
“Once we get to know the volume of water entering a grid area and the volume of water being supplied to the houses in the grid, we will be able to assess the loss, which could be because of leaks in the line or excessive wastage,” said the official.
