Water crisis in Rangamati acute

Local people in Rangamati are facing an intensifying water crisis due to a number of factors.

The Department of Public Health Engineering in Rangamati, the agency responsible for supplying water to the townspeople, mainly blamed to frequent power outages for the crisis. The department also blamed several other factors, including outdated infrastructure, staff and pump shortage, misuse of water, illegal connections, and system loss, for worsening the situation.

The frequent load-shedding of power in the town seriously hampers the water supply activities of the DPHE, which does not have any electricity generator of its own to continue with the work, according to the officials of the department.

The DPHE sub-assistant engineer, Somesh Ali, said they had lifted water from the Kaptai Lake with seven pumps, reserved it in a large reservoir, and from there supplied it to the town using 15 other pumps.

'We can lift 1.4 million gallons of water a day while the town's present demand is for at least two million gallons,' he said.

The pumps used to lift water from the Kaptai Lake were rundown and could go wrong any time, disrupting the town's water supply system, he said.

'The department is also understaffed, having only 10 staff to carry out the water supply tasks for the town,' Shomesh Ali said.

'We need at least 40 people to do the work,' he added.

Some DPHE officials estimated that there were around 3,000 illegal water connections in the town, while the number of legal connections was 4,687.

'While these connections deprive our office of considerable revenue, we have no proper means to disconnect them,' said Achiur Rahman, a DPHE engineer in-charge of its Kawkhali upazila office.

The department needed mobile court to take action against the users of illegal connections, he said.  

The Rangamati DPHE could not become cost-effective as its revenue was less than the electricity bill it paid for the water supply operations, said Shomesh Ali, citing that in March 2011 it earned Tk 5,03,800 from its clients and paid Tk 9,44,000 in electricity bill.

The office was yet to pay Tk 132 lakh to the Power Development Board while its clients owed it around Tk 5 lakh in water bills, he said.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts affairs ministry had recently granted a Tk 400 million project for development of the water supply system in Rangamati, said Achiur Rahman.

A new water treatment plant would be set up under the project, he said.

At present, they have three such plants for Rangamati – two at Tabalchari and the other on the DPHE premises at Kalindipur.

The DPHE officials called on the townspeople for not wasting water and to have patience until the new water treatment plant was set up.

Source : New Age