Interview Times Puri became the first city in the country to have a 24×7 drink-from-tap facility. This implies that the city presently has safe drinking water that can be utilized straightforwardly from the tap for cooking and drinking, without requiring to encourage filtration. Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik inaugurated the ‘Sujal’ or drink-from-tap mission on July 26.
On October 20, 2017, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik propelled a conspired for the all-inclusive scope of tap water in each family within the state. As per this, every single family within the state was to urge a tap connection.
Over the next two years, the state government made significant progress. In many urban local bodies, pipeline networks crossed 80 to 90 percent of the target, according to the government. With only 10-15 percent area cleared out to be covered, the government then came up with the 5T governance mantra in 2019.
G Mathi Vathanam, lodging, and urban development secretary told India Nowadays that the objective of 5T (Transparency, Technology, Teamwork, Time and Transformation) governance was to bring transformative change in the life of citizens.
CM Naveen Patnaik, in a review meeting with bureaucrats in 2019, said that genuine transformative change may be brought into the lives of citizens when they can drink water specifically from the tap. Subsequently, there was a move towards the quality of the water supply.
Without any existing drink-from-tap project to draw from within the nation, the state government sent a group of senior engineers to Singapore to get training from the water authorities there.
The team then brainstormed with other senior authorities and a plan was arranged in the premise of the requirements and accessibility of water in Odisha. The drink-from-tap mission then commenced.
The Odisha government zeroed in on ISO-10500 quality water. As per the standard, there are thirty quality parameters counting chemical and metal content on the basis of which the security of water is adjudged. In case those measures are met, the water can be named ‘assured quality water’. That is the quality preferred for mineral water.
The treatment of the water takes care of the qualitative aspect. The water for Puri is drawn from Bhargavi river through a channel and impounded in a supply. In the store, a single centralized treatment plant has been built at Samango.
After the water is treated, it is drawn through a transmission pipeline to the city’s overhead tanks and underground stores. From there, ISO-10500 quality drinking water is provided to families.
The centralized treatment plant incorporates a capacity of 42 million liters per day. Additionally, a water testing research facility has been prepared with advanced testing offices for standard water quality observing and reconnaissance to guarantee the quality. Chlorine dosing systems with automated programmable logic controllers (PLCs) have also been installed to guarantee fitting water quality at the customer end.
The Odisha government has scaled up the ‘Drink from Tap’ mission for nearly the whole urban population. By October 2023, it plans to cover 17 cities, in this manner covering eighty per cent of the state’s urban population. Implementation of the mission has already commenced in 17 towns of the state counting Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Rourkela, and Baripada.
