Public Health Engg dept to produce 6L packaged drinking water bottles per day for Corona warriors

Kolkata: The state Public Health Engineering (PHE) department has decided to run all its packaged drinking water plants round-the-clock to meet increasing demand among doctors, health

workers, policemen and others who are working at the forefront to check the spread of COVID-19.

The demand for water is shooting up every day as the mercury in the city is showing a simultaneous rise for the past few days. The PHE department had initially set a target of per day production of 4 lakh bottles of packaged drinking water — Prandhara. "Now, we have set a new target of 6 lakh bottle production per day," said state PHE minister Soumen Mahapatra.

It was the brainchild of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to set up packaged drinking water plants under the supervision of the PHE department and she had named it 'Prandhara'. There are 10 such plants, set up at different locations in both North and South Bengal in a systematic manner to ensure proper distribution of packaged drinking water in all parts of the state.

The Chief Minister has directed the department to ensure sufficient supply of packaged drinking water for doctors, health workers, policemen and others who are directly involved in battling Corona.

Mahapatra said: "Initially, employees were working in two shifts. Now, we would be engaging more people to run the plants in all three shifts and it would be done to increase production to 6 lakh bottles per day."

"We are following the directions of the Chief Minister and want to ensure that there is no dearth in supply of safe drinking water at the hospitals," Mahapatra said adding that if needed contractual workers of the department would also be engaged in the plants to run an additional shift to ensure required production.