Details: These Bihar cities will receive Ganga water delivery as part of CM Nitish Kumar’s GWSS programme.
Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, is getting ready to dedicate the expansive Ganga Water Supply Scheme (GWSS) to the general public in Nalanda and Gaya on November 27 and 28, respectively, as part of the state’s Jal-Jeevan-Hariyali initiative.
With this action, drinking water from the Ganga would be made available to Bodh Gaya, Gaya, and Rajgir. Since these areas didn’t have direct access to the Ganges due to their location, CM Nitish Kumar made the decision to transform floodwater into drinking water.
The first-of-its-kind GWSS aims to collect floodwater during the monsoon season and store it in specially built reservoirs. The water so saved will be cleaned and made suitable for human consumption before being delivered to residents’ and visitors’ houses.
The project’s importance can be determined by the fact that a special Cabinet Meeting was called at Bodh Gaya in December 2019 when the proposal was first announced.
WRD Minister Sanjay Jha, who oversaw the project from the beginning and made the announcement of the Chief Minister’s inauguration of this massive project, stated that “the vision and foresight of the CM and the steady resolve of his department has made it possible to execute this unique water management initiative in record time.”
A sizable infrastructure was built under the first phase by Hyderabad-based MEIL, which is carrying out the entire project. At Hathidah in the Mokama neighbourhood of Patna, an intake well-cum-pump house was first constructed.
Water is transported from Hathidah to the Rajgir detention tank via a network of pipelines. Four pump houses total have been built, one each in Hathidah, Rajgir, Tetar, and Gaya.
At Rajgir, Tetar, and Gaya, this project has three storage reservoirs with live capacity. From these reservoirs, water will be transferred to three distinct Water Treatment Plants (WTPs) in Rajgir, Manpur, and Gaya, each of which has a different capacity.