TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
MARGAO: With not a drop of water flowing in their taps for a week, residents of Gogol on Tuesday took to the streets demanding immediate restoration of water supply or face action.
With the PWD moving at a snail’s pace to find out the blockage point and restore the water supply, residents have now threatened to stop traffic at the Bolshe Junction, Gogol, if water supply is not restored immediately.
PWD senior officials were at the receiving end of angry residents, numbering around 600 families, staying in and around the Bolshe traffic junction. While they showered praises on Junior Engineer Vivek Kudchadkar for his efforts to find out the fault for a week now, PWD higher ups came in for criticism for not providing men and machinery to complete the work on a priority basis.
“There’s been no drop of water in our taps since the last seven days. From day one, we are complaining to the PWD officials, but they maintain that they are checking. For a week now, they have been only digging the roads to find out the fault”, informed an elderly citizen Somant Joglekar.
“PWD officials say they have made available water to residents through tankers, but that is not a permanent solution,” demanded Dr Roopa Valaulikar, adding that people have no water tanks to store water supplied from tankers.
What has agitated the residents is that the PWD officials have been only groping in the dark over the fault. “They were not equipped with any plan or chart of the pipeline. They had no diagram of the pipeline laid along the road. It appeared they were only shooting arrows in the air”, Joglekar said, adding that the PWD also refused to dig up the main road by closing the traffic.
PWD Executive Engineer, Pravin Fatarpekar, who visited the site, told the media that the PWD has finally found the fault in the main line. He, however, said it will take minimum two days to restore the water supply.
To a query, he said the PWD officials could not make use of machinery to detect the fault since the water supply is now running in the middle of the road.
