Civic body has been trying to prepare a map since 2009 but it has not been able to make much headway.
Since 2009, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has been trying to prepare a map of the city’s underground drainage and water supply lines but has not been able to make much progress.
As AMC is not technologically equipped to do the job on its own, it had invited several companies to prepare the map. However, none of the firms which responded could come up with a comprehensive solution.
Currently, city residents are put to great inconvenience whenever a drainage line gets damaged accidentally during construction or maintenance work for roads. Hence, the civic body, in 2009, had decided to prepare a map of the underground pipelines so that accidental damage could be avoided.
“We want a map which has clearly marked routes of all the drainage pipes and water supply lines passing beneath the roads. We also want to keep a record of the depth at which the lines are laid, their diameter and exact location so that they are not damaged accidentally during digging for a project,” an official of AMC’s engineering department said. Three years have passed but the map is yet to see the light of day. Companies that responded to the civic body’s invitation to demonstrate how to prepare a map could not come up with a satisfactory solution.
“The technologies offered by the companies had the capacity to recognize and capture the pipelines till a depth of only 3 metres.
This was not sufficient for our purpose. Moreover, the maps prepared by them were not accurate as many pipelines and connections were missing. The city has pipes that are laid out deeper,” the official said. Another problem is that the engineering department has no official record of pipes laid before 2006. This makes it difficult to carry out any major digging work in the city.
Water pipelines are laid in 390 sq km of the 464.16 sq km area of the city. While the engineering department has a record of pipelines laid in 76 sq km, it is trying to detect the exact location of the lines spread in another 192 sq kilometres area. “Of the remaining area, we have a record of the main trunk lines but not of smaller distribution lines,” the official said. Even satellite imaging has been used to get the lay of the underground pipes. “We also tried a combination of a Graphical Interface System (GIS) and the space-based Global Positioning System (GPS) to detect the location of the pipes. But the system could not detect many of the underground pipelines,” the AMC official said.
Two German companies have given demonstrations for a computerized map while a UK-based company will give a demonstration later.
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