Citizens to alert water board on overflowing manholes

HYDERABAD: In an innovative move, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB) has decided to rope in locals to alert its officials on water & sewer pollution and overflowing manholes so that corrective measures can be taken.
The HMWS&SB has noticed that water and sewer pollution complaints are being reported ve ry often from certain areas.In order to effectively deal with this, the water board has collected data from Metro Customer Care (MCC) on areas frequently reporting water and sewer complaints. The MCC has been collecting data on complaints, area-wise, for the past five years and identified 700 areas reporting complaints regularly.
For instance, most complaints are reported from areas in O&M Divisions-II (Riyasathnaagar, Malakpet) in the Old City, Division-III (Gudimalkapur, Karwan) and Division-V (Narayanguda). “We have identified the 700 hot spots to attend to complaints quickly. The complaints were categorised into two, areas reporting water pollution 10 to 15 times a month and those reporting over 15 complaints during the same period,“ HMWS&SB director-operations G Rameshwar Rao told STOI.
“We compiled the data of the complaints along with areas and sent it to the general managers chief general managers to attend them and send feedback,“ he said.
Explaining the reason for regular complaints, the official said the water and sewer pipelines were laid nearly five decades ago.They suffer damages regularly and locals lodge complaints on the MCC hotline '155313', he added.
When contacted, HMWS&SB director-technical P S Suryanarayana said the water board prepared a detailed report on 'Water Safety Plan' five years ago estimating the cost for executing it at Rs 900 crore.
“Though the water board has requested the government to allot funds in the budget, we are yet to get a reply,“ he added.