Water meters installed in various parts of the city ‘fail’ to stop wastage
Telegraph | 5 March 2025
Water meters were installed in many parts of Calcutta; they served important lessons but were not of much benefit beyond that.
Civic engineers told Metro the meters showed that many households were wasting water. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) could not act on the information because it cannot impose penalties on those found wasting water or charge residents on consumption. These measures could have stopped the wastage.
Addressing the civic body’s budget session last week, Calcutta mayor Firhad Hakim said the KMC produced more than adequate water for the city. Without any wastage, the potable water produced would have been enough.
“Without water wastage, there would not have been any scarcity. The KMC produced 313 million gallons of water in a day in 2010. Today, we produce 513 million gallons. This is adequate to serve the needs of the people of Calcutta,” said Hakim.
“We have installed some water meters, but we did not get much benefit from them,” he added.
Water meters
The meters were installed in pockets of north and south Calcutta. In the north, water meters were installed in the Tala-Belgachhia-Cossipore area. In south Calcutta, they were installed in pockets of Kasba, Jadavpur, Patuli and Joka.
The meters were installed under the Kolkata Environmental Improvement Investment Programme. The Asian Development Bank funded the project. “We installed 44,000 water meters in select areas of Calcutta,” said a KMC official.
The meters are installed at the mouth of the water pipe entering a household from the KMC’s distribution network. “Fixing the meter at the mouth of the pipe tells how much water goes into the household each day. If we divide it by the number of people living in that household, we can calculate the per capita consumption of that household,” said a KMC official.
Wastage
Metro had reported in 2018 that the readings from the water meters installed in north Calcutta showed the volume of water entering multiple households crossed 600 litres per person per day.
When the meters were installed in the Kasba-Patuli-Jadavpur belt, the readings again showed rampant wastage.
Sources in the KMC said the average water consumption of many households in these areas was 300 litres per person per day.
“This was surprising because many residents from these areas complain about water shortage. The meters showed that many residents were also using more than the national benchmark,” an official said.
In some households in both pockets, the daily consumption had crossed 800 litres per person per day.
A senior official of the KMC associated with the water meter installation work said the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO), which functions under the ministry of housing and urban affairs, has fixed 135 litres per person per day as the water requirement for the country.
This includes water needed for drinking, bathing, washing clothes and cleaning oneself.
Failure
According to KMC engineers, the water meters had indicated a large volume of water wastage, but the civic body could not act on it.
“We lack the mandate to impose penalties or to charge residents for water consumption for domestic connections. We charge commercial establishments, but a lot of wastage happens in domestic households,” said a KMC engineer.
“Until someone wasting water is penalised, the wastage will not stop. On the contrary, we have to deploy some people to maintain the data from the water meters,” said the official.
The late Trinamul leader Subrata Mukherjee had proposed water tax when he was Calcutta’s mayor between 2000 and 2005. But his party chief Mamata Banerjee did not allow that.
Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya of the CPM, who was Calcutta’s mayor from 2005 to 2010, did not proceed with the proposal either.