Rs 29cr Opa project for Smart City set to boost Panaji’s water supply

Ponda: Work on the new project at Opa Water Works has been completed and is expected to be commissioned soon. The Rs 29 crore project is being constructed chiefly to boost the water supply to Smart City Panaji. Once commissioned, the state capital will get about 63 million litres per day (MLD) of water.

The contractor has completed — among other elements —intake wells, an additional pump house with six centrifugal pumps with a capacity of fetching 20 MLD of water each, a 1,500 cubic metre (CuM) sump, a 300 CuM ground level reservoir (GLR), and two master balancing reservoirs of 2,500 litres each on the Curti hill.

Jaiwant Prabhu, an assistant engineer at Opa Water Works who oversees the task, said that the pump house has the centrifugal pumps to make maintenance and repairs easy.

This additional pump house will work simultaneously with the older one, which has three vertical turbine (VT) pumps.

“A successful trial run of the two pumps installed in the new pump house was conducted on Wednesday. The pumps are now fully ready for commissioning,” Prabhu said.

“After commissioning, one VT pump from the old pump house and two centrifugal pumps from the new pump house would collectively pump up to 60 MLD of water.” The new project will be attached to the existing 40 MLD water treatment plant. The plant has three VT pumps which cannot be repaired at Opa, so the new pumping house will have six centrifugal pumps with a capacity to draw 20 MLD of water through each pump.

The 300 CuM GLR would serve as the priming tank. The pumps need water while restarting and the GLR water is used for that, Prabhu said. Although all other works are common, the supervisory control and data acquisition room will be a new attraction.

“Around 1,000 students, from Class IV to Class XII, visit Opa Water Works every year as an extra activity in their curriculum,” Prabhu said. The Opa Water Works has five separate water treatment plants — of 8 MLD, 12 MLD, 54 MLD, 40 MLD, and 27 MLD — that collectively supply 152 MLD of water to Ponda and Tiswadi talukas.