Wasa to install over 0.7m meters

LAHORE :At an estimated cost of around Rs10 billion, Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) has planned to install over 0.7 million water meters out of which 93 percent will be installed on domestic premises and remaining 7 percent at commercial ventures. Sources in Wasa revealed that the Punjab government had already given a go-ahead to Wasa’s proposal “Procurement, Installation, O&M of Water Meters in Lahore” and allowed the agency to install multi-jet dry type smart meters with a life of 15 years.

The meters will improve collection of revenue, minimise illegal connections and unaccounted for water, minimise non-revenue water, conserve water and minimise water pumping cost. The project will be completed in a period of two years, said Wasa Managing Director Syed Zahid Aziz while talking with The News here Monday. He said Wasa would reimburse 40 percent of new meter’s cost to private party after installation of each water meter while it will recover the cost by charging consumer.

The main reason for this move is water conservation, which has already become one of the paramount concerns for the country as depth of underground water table is declining rapidly, Wasa MD said, adding in absence of water meters at production, distribution and consumer ends, the quantity of water produced, supplied, and lost cannot be accurately measured.

Recently, a study conducted by JICA revealed that more than 40 percent of water produced in the provincial metropolis was not contributing to any revenue generation. It added that current water supply system of Wasa was based on the over exploration of ground water and unmetered water supply due to which water losses are enormous.

Wasa MD said that in absence of meters, it was impossible to estimate the supply and demand of water resources.

He said that in order to conserve water resources and to reduce the declining rate of Ground Water Table it was necessary to reduce the water losses. “This can only be done by water metering as reduction in the water losses will reduce the stress on the aquifer and may avoid excessive pumping/extraction of water,” he maintained.

Due to unmetered water supply and low tariff, the per capita consumption of water is very high as it would be in the case of water metering, he said and added that higher consumption of water puts an extra burden on the water aquifer.

“So, in order to discourage the excessive water usage, it is necessary to meter the water connection so the consumer will use the appropriate amount of water and shall avoid the wastage of water resources,” he stated.

Giving details of the benefits of smart meters, Wasa MD said that these meters automatically and electronically capture, collect and communicate up-to-date water usage readings on a real-time basis. This information will be available as an electronic signal, which can be captured, logged and processed like any other signal.

The meters allow agencies to reduce labour costs, improve enforcement efforts and enable leak detection, when interrogated, the data logger downloads the water consumption data to a server, giving a value of water consumption of the required period, identification and reduction of water leakage, improved asset management efficiency and effectiveness, reduced cost of retail operations due to remote inspection, remote water cut off in case of non-payment, water consumption data is readily available to consumer and by using this data consumer can reduce its usage and also identify any leakages or misuse of water and manipulation alert compatible make it almost impossible to manipulate reading.