category Regional, chandigarh, , tags Regional, chandigarh, , DW BUREAU Chandigarh In the 56th meeting of Water Supply and Sewerage Board which held under the Chairmanship of Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal here today, as many as 795 new drinking water supply schemes costing Rs 834.10 crore were approved to augment drinking water supply in urban and rural areas of the State. This also includes 134 new urban water supply and sewerage schemes at a cost of Rs 104.27 crore. Haryana Public Health Engineering Minister, Dr Banwari Lal, and Chairman, Haryana State Commission for Safai Karamcharis, Sh Krishan Kumar were also present in the meeting. An amount of Rs 801.48 crore for 286 already approved works for the current financial year also got confirmed in the meeting, for the acceleration of works on the flagship programmes of Public Health and Engineering Department in Rural and Urban area of the State. The Chief Minister directed to identify water logged areas or pockets in rural as well as urban areas of the State where water logging occurs in every rainy season so that proactive measures could be taken to mitigate the issue of water logging. He asked to constitute a core group of officers of the concerned departments to deliberate upon the issue according to the different areas and prepare plans for the effective utilization of water-logged land in fisheries, construction of ponds and water bodies, irrigation etc. He also directed that besides cleaning of ponds, possibilities should also be explored for the utilization of pond soil for different purposes. It was also informed in the meeting that work for the water supply and sewerage system in eight Mahagram villages has already been completed. At present, works in 29 Mahagram villages are in progress and out of these, work in 10 such villages would be completed by December 2023. For the rest of the villages, an impetus has been given to escalate the pace of work. It was further informed that field officers of Public Health and Engineering Department and Development and Panchayats Departments have been directed to work in coordination for repair and restoration of streets damaged during laying of water supply and sewerage pipelines on priority basis. The Chief Minister was apprised that a dashboard has been developed on the Public Health Engineering Department website to show status of STPs installed by all concerned departments. Apart from this, monitoring of utilization of treated waste water is being done through a portal recently launched by Haryana Water Resources Authority. Similarly, another dashboard has been developed on the department website depicting the status of water allocated in Liters Per Capita Per Day (LPCD) for each rural habitation of Haryana. (editor dailyworld.in)