CMRL to have own water plant to meet demands

Going by Rs 38.25 lakh value tender floated by CMRL on August 8, the plant (80kld) would treat ‘borewell’ water at metro’s sprawling admin/depot complex. CMRL currently requires around 80,000 litres per day with the depot/admin accounting for half of it, while the elevated and underground corridors consume 25,000 and 15,000 litres respectively.

A CMRL spokesperson said, “We have a sophisticated rain water harvesting facility in our depot and admin building. The yield has been good recently. We have three large sumps to collect rainwater. Groundwater level is also good. Hence, we have decided to tap our rain water harvesting and borewell facilities first.”

Though CMRL might justify the plant’s installation by citing intermittent rains in the city and rise in groundwater level recently, metro rail has started looking elsewhere only after CMWSSB turned unreliable. A CMRL source confirmed that CMWSSB has not been supplying water to them for nearly a month.

Understandably, it was then that CMRL had embarked on reducing its reliance on CMWSSB or rather turning self-sufficient, as it has been during the last month, tapping water from its RWH sumps and borewells. Asked if extraction of such a high volume would not drain the borewells in the neighbourhood, the spokesperson said that they have reduced their requirement by 10kld to 70kld by reusing water in Koyambedu complex already and the main water source would be the three RWH sumps and borewell would only be a supporting facility.