Irrigation dept to set up 7 quality control laboratories across state

Kolkata: In a bid to ensure timely completion of work, the state Irrigation and Waterways Department will set up a total of seven quality control laboratories all across the state.

The Irrigation and Waterways department is the first among those carry out infrastructure development work to set up its own quality control centre which will ensure minimum time and investment for proper quality tests of materials.

In the absence of such laboratories in the state, samples had to be sent to other institutes or sometimes even in other states for quality testing. It was assessed that the progress of development work slowed down as the entire process of getting the samples tested from other institutes or outside the state was time consuming and hectic as well. Now, with the setting up of the laboratories, the work will get expedited.

The first-of-its-kind was set up at Haringhata in Nadia in October and two more have been set up at East and West Midnapore on Monday. Rajib Banerjee, the state Irrigation minister, inaugurated the centres.

There are four more in the pipeline and those will come up at Salt Lake, Bankura, Burdwan and one in North Bengal. The quality control centre at Salt Lake will also serve the city while the one that will come up in Bankura will be helpful for Purulia as well. The centre in Nadia will cater to two districts — North 24-Parganas and Nadia itself.

All the quality control centres are fitted with modern gadgets and equipment to facilitate error-free reports after testing samples of materials including sand, steel and even concrete.

It may be mentioned that there is also a planning to initiate two degree courses on "River Engineering" and "Hydrology and Hydro-informatics" at the Haringhata centre in Nadia. In a bid to help engineers of the Irrigation and Waterways department to update themselves, a decision has been taken to commence short term courses at the same place. The state Irrigation department has undertaken a number of projects that have helped in infrastructural development in the past six years.