Kolkata: Kusum Acharya, 57, a resident of Baksha village at Chanditala in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, has to face in a queue each morning to gather ingesting water from the village tube-well as she doesn’t get water from the faucet put in in her home.
Theft of ingesting water from underground pipelines has grow to be a serious hurdle for the TMC authorities in West Bengal. (Representational picture)
“Earlier a trickle of water used to come out of the tap. But now even that has stopped. For the past nine months we have been depending on the local pond or standing in the queue to collect water from the village tube-well. Several families in our village are facing the same problem. Repeated appeals to the panchayat have not yielded any results,” Acharya mentioned.
Theft of ingesting water from underground pipelines has grow to be a serious hurdle for the Trinamool Congress authorities to fulfil its ballot promise of offering piped ingesting water to twenty million households in West Bengal.
Supplying piped ingesting water to each family was within the manifestos of each the TMC and the BJP within the 2021 elections. The BJP’s manifesto proposed establishing a ₹10,000 crore fund to offer ingesting water to each family by 2024 whereas the TMC in its manifesto promised to offer piped ingesting water to twenty million households by 2026.
“The government has announced the Jal Swapno Scheme to provide piped drinking water to the entire 20 million households in West Bengal in the next five years with a budget outlay of ₹58,000 Crore,” the TMC’s manifesto of 2021 claimed.
Three years down the road, villagers complain that they don’t get water from the faucets put in of their family.
“We have already installed drinking water pipelines to around 9.4 million households till around December 5. But allegations have poured in from several villages that even though the pipelines have been laid, drinking water hasn’t reached the households. One of the major reasons behind this is theft of water from these pipelines,” mentioned a senior authorities official.
Irked with such allegations pouring in from nearly each district, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee held a gathering with senior bureaucrats of the state earlier this month, officers mentioned. The chief minister ordered a survey to search out out the quantum of the issue of water-theft.
“We have detected around 20,170 points from where water was being stolen. Holes were being made in the underground pipelines to steal water to supply hotels, petrol pumps, construction sites, ice-cream factories, poultry farms, roadside garages and to agricultural farms. We have lodged around 480 FIRs and action has been initiated,” Pulak Roy, state public well being engineering minister.
The utmost variety of such instances have been detected in East Midnapore (3893), adopted by South 24 Parganas (3879) and North 24 Parganas (3031). Not less than 2603 instances have been detected in East Burdwan and 2316 instances in Nadia districts.
“The chief minister flagged concerns saying that not only was this theft of drinking water illegal but it was also a dangerous trend as any kind of contamination in the drinking water could lead to a major disaster,” mentioned a senior PHE official.
Officers additionally mentioned that in lots of areas it was discovered that though the pipelines have been put in there was no supply of water within the neighborhood. It has been discovered that in lots of instances the detailed mission report to put in the pipelines was ready with out conducting any soil check or checking the supply of water.
“The chief minister in an administrative meeting held on December 2 has directed to identify the contractors who were involved in preparing such faulty DPRs and initiate action against them. They are likely to be black-listed,” mentioned an official.
With the subsequent meeting elections due in 2026 the state authorities has now set a goal to revive these gaps by April 2025 in order that the promise of supplying piped ingesting water might be fulfilled forward of the polls. The state PHE division has even floated two numbers for residents to report issues of water theft.
The BJP, nonetheless, has already stepped up its assault in opposition to the TMC -government over the problem.
“West Bengal is lagging behind other states in the Jal Jeevan Mission. Had the state government cooperated and implemented the flagship projects of the Centre, the face of West Bengal would have undergone a sea change. The BJP doesn’t differentiate when it comes to infrastructure projects. It is the TMC which does this and this is taking West Bengal backwards,” mentioned Samik Bhattacharya, BJP spokesperson.