Water tariff hike looms, but urban poor can breathe easy

Water tariff hike is imminent. If Escoms get the nod from Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission to increase per-unit cost, the water board will put forward a request too.

Its proposal will depend on the revised cost of power. The board is now waiting for the new rate to be announced, said BWSSB chairman PB Ramamurthy.

The board is yet to work out the percentage of hike for different slabs. Its proposal will be made keeping in mind the day-to-day maintenance and operations costs which are increasing, he said. “An enhancement would have to be affected so the board’s services can keep citizens comfortable, not burdened,” he said.
The board is already paying large sums of interest towards its loans taken for other schemes; their repayment has become a problem. It is, however, not looking at tariff to help repay these, but only trying to recover its operational costs, he said. “The urban poor will not be burdened,” he told journalists on Wednesday.
Associated with  Water Summit

As part of its continuous endeavour towards employee growth, the BWSSB will involve itself in the planning and organising of a three-day world water summit that will be held in Bangalore in February next year.

Organised by the Centre for Sustainable Development, a non-profit organisation, the summit intends to bring together researchers, technocrats, policy-makers, solution-providers, industry bodies, consultants from across the world.

The board’s interest in the summit is purely academic, the chairman said. “It is a sort of personality development for our engineers, since all of them don’t get to travel abroad to see the latest developments. Now that the experts will come to our city, it will give them good exposure,” he said.

Recently, a team of BWSSB engineers participated in the Singapore Water Week. Two engineers were sent to the US on a World Bank sponsorship. It is expensive to send engineers on such trips and therefore not done very often.

However, board engineers will participate in large numbers in the summit, he said. Ramamurthy added that the organisers are yet to make a formal request to BWSSB on the help it requires from the latter.

Advisor to chief minister and chairman of CSD, Dr A Ravindra said that such an event would be a platform for best practices solutions to be discussed. Bottled water, water purification is a Rs10,000 crore business in the country. It’s a dynamic one. Those part of it would come together in the summit, whose central aim is to “generate the right ideas for water security”, he said.

Bangalore will become a hub in water and sewerage sector just as it has become for information technology, Ramamurthy said.