From Our Correspondent
TURA: The State Government is planning to replace the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC) with the State run Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) to manage the water distribution network in Tura and its surrounding areas.
A proposal to handover responsibility for the water distribution and maintenance network to the PHE was taken up in a meeting held here on Tuesday which was spearheaded by Tura North MLA and Parliamentary Secretary Noverfield R Marak with senior officials from the departments of PHE, Soil and Water Conservation and Forest, besides members of NGOs.
“The PHE has for long been distributing water and maintaining the supply in several parts of Tura town while the District Council has been looking after other areas. We feel it will be better if a single department takes charge,” said Marak.
Tura is currently facing an acute water shortage at several places with the greatest impact being felt in the heavily populated areas of the town such as Hawakhana, Tura Bazar, Araimile and New Tura region. With the Monsoons unlikely to hit the region before the month of June, there is little solace for the parched citizens of the town who are dependent on handouts from water tankers.
The current distribution of water falls short of the required quantity for the town’s population because only three out of six pumping machines are currently operational at Edenbari pumping station.
These machines require substantial amount of time to reach optimum pumping of water but frequent disruption to power supply leads to major breakdowns. Until and unless there is uninterrupted power supply pumping of water would continue to face several problems, it was agreed upon.
To compound the problem further, there are multiple leaks at many stages of the distribution network and the District Council has been accused several times of failing to repair lines and maintain the flow in the respective locality lines it had been tasked to do so.
Some of the proposals mooted at the meeting were to apprise the government on the need to hand complete responsibility on pumping and distributing of water and maintenance of lines to the PHE at the earliest, to get the three remaining pumping waters operational by September before the start of the next dry season and taking up urgent steps to protect the catchment areas from deforestation to ensure year long flow of the rivers and streams.