THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Revenue mobilisation has been a top priority for the Kerala Water Authority (KWA). However, in spite of repeated mobilisation drives and proclamations, the KWA has been dealing with hundreds of drinking water connections which have either remained unidentified or unaccounted for. “Reducing the Non-Revenue Water (NRW) and increasing the revenue have remained the main objectives of the KWA for the last few years. We are collecting details pertaining to all the unidentified consumers and would be focusing on bulk consumers first,” said KWA MD Asok Kumar Singh.Meanwhile, a review meeting convened by the Accounts Member of the KWA will be held on Thursday. This would focus on revenue mobilisation in the Thiruvananthapuram PH Division and executive engineers, assistant executive engineers, assistant engineers of the four sub-divisions under the PH division, officials of the revenue mobilisation cell and other top officials will be attending the meeting.“There are many live, existing water connections for which bills are not being served due to various reasons. The bills are there, but we can’t identify the particular connection. Such cases have been a curse for the KWA, which is going through an acute financial crisis,” said a KWA official. There are other consumers who’ve not received any water bill at all for years!An example being the water connection of a bank functioning at Aristo Junction. The KWA had not served any bill for the last 15 years. The bank is functioning in a building owned by a private party. The particular connection (VAZ/8437/N) in the name of Kunjukunju K was taken in 1995. It was the anti-theft squad of the KWA which found that the water consumption charges of the same were not being recorded. In November last year, the connection was disconnected and has not been restored yet. The total arrears come to ` 85,536. Meanwhile, the squad also found that the office of Kerafed has been functioning in the same building without paying the water charges (the connection was taken in 1996), which now come to around ` 1,21,835. “The squad had brought to light that a single individual had two non-domestic connections in his name. However, these arrears have not been cleared by the consumer. It is quite appalling that the KWA heads who show much urgency in disconnecting the connection of common people when they fail to pay their bills have not been able to extract the money from this particular consumer. In fact, such consumers are draining the coffers of the KWA,” a source pointed out. According to another top official, there are thousands of unidentified consumers in Thiruvananthapuram PH division alone. “Once, there was a proposal to utilise the service of retired hands of the KWA to identify these consumers. But that didn’t work out,” another KWA official pointed out.
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