Muddy water supplied by PHE in Canal Road area
STATE TIMES NEWS
JAMMU: It appears senior officials of the Public Health Engineering (PHE) Department in Jammu are not paying attention to the repeated directions issued by the PHE Minister Sham Lal Choudhary to ensure adequate supply of safe drinking water to the local residents.
Complaints related to supply of contaminated and muddy water, unfit for human consumption, have been reaching PHE officers from across different residential areas but so far no corrective measures have been taken.
For the past over two months, the department is struggling to ensure regular supply of safe drinking water to local residents of Jammu.
On Tuesday it was the turn of residents of Canal Road area. Soon after tap water was supplied by the PHE, several households were stunned to see ‘muddy’ water flowing from their taps.
Surinder Pal Nayyar Vice President, Canal Road Residents Welfare Association said, “PHE is supplying us muddy water; we have lodged our protest before the PHE engineers but all in vain.”
“We the residents of the Canal Road area have stopped drinking PHE supply water and are buying packed water as the department is supplying totally contaminated water but today it has supplied muddy water, said Sanjay Aggarwal, Senior Vice President Canal Road Residents Welfare Association.
“The residents took adequate samples in bottles and reported the matter to the nearby PHE station to prevent supply of muddy water, Nayyar said.
He claimed, “We have been highlighting the issue of contaminated and muddy water for past several days but no one in the PHE office took note of our complaints.”
The women in the area complained they have been storing muddy water in their kitchen buckets and later on boiling the same to cook food after filtering the mud. We are worried now. How long we can drink contaminated water and still survive without contracting any gastronomical diseases.
The local residents in the area claimed that Canal Road is one of the oldest residential area in the Jammu city and if PHE cannot supply safe drinking water within municipal limits how can we trust them to meet demand of people of far flung areas.
PHE minister Sham Lal Choudhary said, “I will look into the matter and assured that this problem shall be sorted out immediately.”
“Strict instructions have been already passed to all the PHE divisions to ensure supply of clean water,’ Choudhary said.
PHE authorities are struggling to meet the demand and supply gap due to short supply of water from local filtration plants. Due to rainy season, lot of silt has been accumulated and making the job of water filtration time consuming and cumbersome. Secondly, constant breakdown of power supply due to inclement weather conditions also takes a heavy toll on PHE pumping and filtration stations, the minister said.
