Punjab Government has decided to install online water quality testing meters at the inlet points of all rivers or and canals, from where water is being extracted for drinking purpose, to ensure supply of safe drinking water.
Announcing this while presiding a high-level meeting, the state Water Supply and Sanitation Minister Razia Sultana said that the purpose of this entire exercise is to ensure that water is being treated properly and all dangerous toxic heavy metals are removed from the water supplied for drinking purpose.
Sultana said that it was our statutory and moral responsibility to provide safe drinking water to the citizen of Punjab. “Punjab government is very much concerned about the reported cases of contamination of various water bodies in Punjab. The land of five rivers is in the news for bad reasons, water level is fast depleting besides the water bodies are being contaminated,” she said.
She said that Congress Government is fully aware of its statutory duty and “we have, in principle, decided to install meters at different river or canal outlets from where the water is extracting to drinking purposes”.
The Minister directed the Principle Secretary Jaspreet Talwar to expedite the process of mapping of all the canals and rivers and all the inlet points from where water is taken out for drinking purpose. “Once we have the mapping done, we will be able to know how many meters are to be installed and at what location,” she said.
Talwar apprised the Minister that two ‘Water Testing laboratories’ at SAS Nagar and Patiala have also been accredited by National Board of Accreditation of labs (NABl), and soon, one more advanced laboratory equipped with facilities for analyzing heavy metals and other containments will be established at Amritsar.
The Minister further added that to streamline and to make the process of water testing easy, three more laboratories are being upgraded. With this, Punjab will have six state-of-the-art, hi-tech upgraded laboratories to conduct the sampling of water, she said.
Sultana also said that that the Department is in the process of filling 210 posts of junior engineers, and Patiala’s Thapar University has been mandated to fill these posts — for which, the advertisement will appear within a week, and the entire recruitment process will be completed within three months.