AS THE first phase of relief for quake victims comes to an end, the State Government is bracing up to meet the challenges of providing drinking water to the drought-affected areas. Nearly 70 per cent of the state's population faces an acute shortage of
drinking water for the second successive year.
As the first step towards improving the water supply, water from the Narmada river will be lifted at the dam site and taken through pipelines to Raska Weir, near Ahmedabad.
The Raska Weir cum pipeline project was completed last year at a cost of Rs 110 crore and had eased the drinking water shortage in Ahmedabad city. This project, which involves water from Narmada reservoir travelling 148 km through canals up to Timba and
then joining the Shedi canal to Raska Weir, will be launched on Tuesday.
With this scheme, the daily supply of water to Ahmedabad will go up from 50 million gallons per day (GDP) to 80 million GPD, State Water Supplies Secretary R K Tripathy told the Hindustan Times on Sunday.
It will no longer be necessary to pump in water from Mahi river. This can be diverted to Saurashtra region. The Narmada project is likely to provide relief to the Saurashtra region, where the ground water level has gone down to 1,500 feet.
The project, which will take drinking water to 1,600 villages and 35 cities in Saurashtra within a week, has been completed at a cost of Rs 43 crore.
The pipeline network will have several branch lines that will take the water to the worst affected areas in Rajkot, Amreli, Junagadh and Bhavnagar districts of Saurashtra.
The Ajwa storage reservoir in Vadodara is already receiving water since Saturday, said Tripathy.
Under this project, 1,200 cusecs of water will be pumped through 54 pipelines of four metres diameter each. The pipelines will also fill up the lakes and ponds on the route.
