BENGALURU: With nearly 35 million litres of water going waste each day due to leaking ground level reservoirs, which are four to five decades old, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) had decided to repair the leaks a year ago. However, the Board is now caught in a fix as repeated tenders for some of them are just not eliciting responses.
Bengaluru has 52 ground level reservoirs where 1,350 million litres of water pumped from KRS reservoir are stored before redistributing it across the city. Repair works need to be carried out to set right the leaks on most of these reservoirs. BWSSB had called for tenders to restore one such reservoir on Bull Temple Road and two reservoirs at CJF in Malleswaram recently.
“The reservoirs at Malleswaram did not generate any response. We are planning to call for tenders once again,” a top BWSSB official said. The capacity of the reservoir built in 1971 is 14 million litres while that built in 1981 can stock 9 million litres, he said. The cost of restoring these reservoirs was estimated to be Rs 14.81 crore. The first round of tendering for reservoir on Bull Temple Road did not generate any response while the second round has now found one bidder.
This reservoir can house 22.5 million litres and is estimated to cost Rs 4.93 crore. “We have now got a bidder, Bengaluru-based Turnkey Engineering, and we award it to them,” the official added. Asked for the reasons behind the lacklustre response, another top official said, “There are two main reasons for it. Firstly, these kind of reservoirs are found only in a few big cities in the country. So not many have the kind of expertise to carry out the repairs.”
Another reason is that construction firms are willing to build new structures but not many are keen on working on old buildings. Another major project to lay sanitary pipelines under the Cauvery Water Supply Project, for which tenders were called for recently, too has not generated any response and re-tendering is on its way, the officials said.