Statesman News Service
MALDA, 23 MARCH: First it was the receding Ganga water and now power shortage that is denying the public health engineering from supplying arsenic-free drinking water in Malda. Although the PHE has been able to draw water from the Ganga after the Farakka Barrage Project authority stopped release of water to Bangladesh, it has not been able to purify the drawn water due to power failure.
The dual problems have held up distribution of arsenic-free drinking water affecting over 5.5 lakh people in three blocks of the district for the past five days.
According to the executive engineer, PHE arsenic division, Mr Debashish Banerjee, power supply to the water treatment plant at Dariapur was suspended following a technical snag. Though the dlectricity department had made an alternative arrangement of supplying power from Dhulian in Murshidabad district, we are not getting the required voltage to operate the pumps to purify water”, he added.
Though Mr Banerjee claimed that he had informed the power department of the low voltage problem, the divisional engineer, electricity department in Malda Mr Dilip Kumar Mondal said: “Mr Banerjee did not inform me about unstable power supply. Neither were we informed of the technical snag”.
Mr Mondal admitted that the transmission wing of the power department was facing problems in supplying power. “We must attend the site to repair the technical snag to supply power to the PHE. The PHE authority should have informed us by now about the problem which it did not”, Mr Mondal said.
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