Water woes to haunt ORR residents till July next despite receiving good monsoon

Hyderabad: The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB) had committed to complete the 2,863 km of drinking water pipeline by December but has now postponed it until the next monsoon. Only about 900 kilometres of phase II of the project have been completed thus far.

If the project does not make reasonable progress this year as a result of the roads being dug up, commuters travelling from the city's periphery to ORR will become a nightmare. The water board administrators stated that the project could only be completed by the following monsoon.

The project calls for building a storage reservoir with a capacity of 137 million cubic metres across a distance of 2,100 kilometres. The agencies have been given the project task, which is currently in process. The project will be implemented over a two-year timeframe.

However, highly placed sources within the water board claim that the HMWSSB is required to complete the project by January 2022 in accordance with the deal it entered into. The government has been timely distributing cash to the ORR phase II project, but officials working closely with the contractors have purposefully slowed down the completion of the project.

The water board has taken longer than expected to meet the deadline by December this year, citing a labour shortage caused by COVID19 and other factors. Even though officials claim that the work is progressing at full swing, they have only been able to complete 900 km of the pipeline and hope to finish the remaining 1,783 km by the monsoon the following year. As a result, citizens and residents on ORR will continue to experience water problems until the following monsoon, despite good rainfall.