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Government yet to roll out O&M policy of Mission Bhagiratha
Operation and Maintenance policy of the project will tell what the users/consumer will be charged and also what subsidy the government can give and whether meters will be fixed to the taps
Hyderabad: Though the Mission Bhagiratha (MB) project was nearing completion and water was being supplied through the project to almost all the villages, the government is yet to finalise the operation and maintenance policy of it.
The operation and maintenance policy would tell what charges have to be collected from the users. It also contains what subsidy the government could give and whether meters would be fixed to the taps.
Though the officials of MB project worked out the details on the operation and maintenance policy of the project they were yet to be submitted to the government. The government has to examine them and announce the policy.
Mission Bhagiratha has been designed to meet the drinking water needs of the people of towns and villages. The project envisages providing treated water through the taps and has been planned with a whopping cost of Rs 45,000 crore.
It was launched in 2015 and works were nearing completion as pipelines have been laid from the source to the treatment plants, from treatment plants to the villages and from overhead tanks of the village to each household.
The government has borrowed money from the banks to complete the project through Mission Bhagiratha Corporation. The Corporation has to repay the loan in instalments. Roughly, Rs 4,500 crore has to be paid to the banks every year.
As the government did not announce the operation and maintenance policy, the officials of the Corporation were in a dilemma. They were servicing the loans through the grants being given to the Rural Water Supply department by the government.
It was not clear whether the government continues to grant funds to the Corporation every year or it would tell the Corporation to make its own arrangements for paying the loan and recovering expenditure.
The officials of the MB Corporation are likely to inform the details of the operation and maintenance costs of the project with Rural Water Supply (RWS).
They have been calculating the expenditure required to pay the bills of the electricity pumps, to maintain the treatment plants, to take up repairs and others.
Sources in the Rural Water Supply department said that they would submit the details of expenditure required for the operation and maintenance of the project as soon as the government asks for it. The government is yet to focus on the expenditure part.
They pointed out that the government has stated in the past that the expenditure would be recovered by selling MB water to the municipalities and industries in bulk and cross subsidise the rural supply. They would keep this aspect when they fix the operational costs.
