CM to inaugurate Rajarhat water project next month

The residents of New Town Rajarhat will start getting the supply of piped filtered water from the last week of January.

The state Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim will request Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to inaugurate the project. The date of its inauguration will be finalised after getting confirmation from Banerjee.

It may be recalled that after coming to power in 2011, Banerjee took up the project and she instructed Hidco and Public Health Engineering department (PHE) to finish it as soon as possible. 

The project worth Rs 350 crore has been undertaken by Hidco. Every day 12 million gallons of filtered water will be supplied to Rajarhat in the first phase.

After its inauguration, the project will solve a long-standing demand of local people and will save them from health hazard. The erstwhile Left Front government and Hidco had installed 54 deep tubes even after knowing that the area was close to Barasat where arsenic contamination had been reported.

On Monday, a high level meeting was organised to review the work progress. State  ministers  for  Urban Development and  Public Health Engineering Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee  were present at the meeting along with principal secretary of PHE Saurav Das and Hidco chairman Debashis Sen. A host of senior engineers of both the departments who are supervising the project  also attended the meeting.

A pumping station to lift the unfiltered water has been constructed at Debendrabala ghat in north Kolkata.