Safe water for all in Khulna in 2 years

Half of 1.5 million Khulna city dwellers are eyeing an end to their chronic water crisis as an ambitious scheme to supply 110 million litres of safe water a day in the next two years is underway.

With severe salinity in the Bhairab and the Rupsha -- two major rivers flowing near Khulna city -- the $364 million scheme aims at fetching Madhumati river's surface water from 69km away and remedy the water crisis, said project officials.  

“We have been suffering from water crisis due to salinity and supply shortfall for decades,” said retired jute mill officer Abdur Rashid who lives in Sonadanga of the city.

“Now we are eyeing an end to a perennial scarcity of safe water with the increased supply.” 

Khulna Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Khulna Wasa) now pumps up 60 million litres of groundwater and supplies it through its pipelines against an aggregated daily demand of 240 million litres. This serves just a quarter of the city population, said Khulna Wasa Managing Director Md Abdullah.

Khulna Wasa also has 10,000 hand tube wells that pump up 50 million litres of water.

Together, they do not meet even half the demand.

As a result, around eight lakh people, including two lakh slum dwellers, in the 56-square kilometre city remain out of any formal coverage of safe water supply, he said.   

“They are left with no option but to survive on unsafe water and supply shortfall putting public health at serious hazards,” said Abdullah, adding, “The increased volume of safe water would serve all city dwellers, including those living in slums.” 

However, a small section would still suffer as there would be a supply shortfall of 20 million litres, he said, adding that with a third of project work accomplished, they would go into production by the end of 2017.

Khulna Wasa extracts groundwater with 83 deep tube wells and those city dwellers outside the formal supply network pump up groundwater with around 20,000 private hand tube wells, said the Wasa deputy managing director and director of the Khulna Water Supply Project.    

But such an extraction is becoming a challenge with increasing contamination of saline water, iron and a depleting water table, the official said.

Oleg Tonkonojenkov, deputy country director of Asian Development Bank, which has contributed $75 million as soft loan to the project implementation fund, said they assisted this project because it is very important to ensure uninterrupted clean and safe water for the people of Khulna.

The project, keeping the climate-change impacts in view, is designed to expand access to potable surface water with an extended distribution network to gradually reduce the dependency on groundwater, said officials concerned. 

Under the project, water of the Madhumati would be taken from Mollahat and pumped through a 33km transmission pipeline to Samantasena on the eastern bank of the Rupsha for treatment.

At Samantasena, the treatment plant would produce 110 million litres of safe water daily. Along with the plant, a reservoir would be built to store over 77 crore litres of untreated water as backup for a week or two in case of salt contamination in the Madhumati going beyond treatable level.

Treated water will be carried along a 36km transmission line further across the Rupsha to the city and stored in seven underground reservoirs with an accumulated capacity of 1,77,600 cubic metres.  

The reservoirs would fill 10 overhead tanks from which the water would be supplied to 75,000 households through the 650km distribution pipeline.

The project is jointly financed by Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) with $184 million and the government contributing $105 million.