Team Herald
PONDA: In a significant development aimed at enhancing water supply to Panjim, a new pump house and water storage tanks have been constructed at the OPA water treatment plant. This will enable an additional 15 million litres per day (MLD) of water to be supplied to the city’s growing needs.
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Speaking at the OPA water treatment plant, Assistant Engineer Jaywant Prabhu announced that while Panjim currently receives around 55 MLD of water, the new infrastructure will increase this supply by an extra 15 MLD by January 2025. The final phase of work is expected to be completed within the next 15 to 20 days.
The pump house project, which began two years ago, was specifically designed to meet the increasing water demands of the Smart City. The total cost of the project is approximately Rs 29 crore, covering civil works, a workshop, and the construction of three storage tanks. Two of the tanks have a capacity of 2,500 cubic metres each, while the third has a 300-cubic metre capacity.
The pump house is equipped with four centrifugal pumps, each capable of pumping 20 MLD of water, alongside two additional 12 MLD pumps. The centrifugal pumps were selected for their ease of repair, a crucial factor for long-term maintenance. So far, testing of two pumps has been successful.
The project is a crucial step in securing the water supply for Panjim, with water from the OPA river being pumped through wells located on the riverbank to the treatment plant. The entire system will include a panel control room, a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) room, a 300-cubic-metre ground-level reservoir (GLR), a workshop, two master balancing reservoirs (MBRs) of 2,500 litres each located at Curti Hill, and a 1,500-cubic-metre sump.
The OPA water works already operates five separate water treatment plants across the region, with capacities of 8 MLD, 12 MLD, 54 MLD, 40 MLD, and 27 MLD, collectively supplying 152 MLD of water to the Ponda and Tiswadi areas. The addition of this new infrastructure is expected to further improve the reliability and sustainability of water distribution to the state’s capital
