NEW DELHI: In a bid to relieve the city sewage system from blockage and overflow, the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) has started working on a sewage master plan 2041 to augment the existing sewer network.
Officials said that environmental auditing firms have been invited to study over a 10,000 kilometer long sewage system which was last updated 23 years ago. The last such study was undertaken in 2000 for Sewer Master Plan 2021.
“Companies have been invited to study the water board’s internal (peripheral) sewer network. The firm has to study the existing network issues and also suggest measures to fix them,” a senior official said.
According to the report prepared by the DJB, the length of sewer network in residential, commercial, industrial and other areas of Delhi is 10,720 km in addition to a 200 km long trunk sewer network. The Jal Board supplies about 990 MGD of water through this network daily, out of which 80 per cent (792 MGD) is sewage waste, which goes to 65 pumping stations and from here it is sent to 38 sewage water treatment plants. The water is treated and released into large drains.
According to the Jal Board officials, on an average, two thousand complaints of sewer jam, sewer overflow and sewer blockage are received in Delhi in a day. “We receive thousands of complaints related to sewage. Keeping the humongous scale of the problem which is also connected with the rising population of the city, an exercise has been started to prepare Sewer Master Plan-2041 to relieve the people of Delhi from this problem,” the senior official added.