Water Supply Issues

Water in the campus comes from the hill top tank. The alternative is to fill your personal sump with tanker water.

The hilltop tank has a capacity of 150,000 litres. The metering is done by submersible pole which is divided into 7 steps. The tank is good enough for 4 days of water supply. Nayak is in charge of ensuring that the tank has water. He also controls the release of water to the campus which is done twice a day.

The hilltop tank is filled from 3 sources.

(a) Srinivas farm: this has a 10 HP 3 phase borewell pump and a small holding tank that is filled from the borewell pump and a 10 HP 3 phase monoblock pump to move the water to the hilltop. The farm is owned by Alt-tech foundation that is a subsidiary of BCIL (the promotors of Trans Indus). They do not do any maintenance and it is up to TIRA to maintain the borewell and the pump. The water is the borewell fluctuates during the seasons as there are a lot of borewells in the area rangin from 3000 litres per hour to 10,000 litres per hour. We have backup borewell and monoblock pumps in case the current ones need repair.
The KEB supply comes under the Talaghattapura jurisdisction. To get the KEB to do anything, the BCIL representatives have to be contacted. The KEB supply is at commercial rates.

(b) Baskar's borewell. Baskar has a borewell in his plot that supplies water at 1800 litres per hour. The borewell has a 10 HP borewell pump which is too much and noisy and therefore needs to be replaced by a 1.5 HP pump. The 10 HP pump requires the running of the 60 KVA generator and replacing it with a 1.5 HP pump will allow the usage of the 30 KVA generator.

(c) Backwash borewell. This was done in 2007 and yields 18000 litres an hour. this has a 10 HP 3 phase borewell pump which sends water along 400 yards of tubing to a 7000 litre sump in the campus. a 10 HP monoblock motor in the sump sends the water to the hilltop. This borewell is powered by KEB Kaglipura. An application has been made to KEB to regularise the meter at commercial rates. This land is owned by Thimaiah, an ex BCIL employee. The pipes go thru various agricultural lands. Although legally no one can stop up drawing pipes thru any land, practically the farmers have disruptive power and can break the pipes. The owner of one of the lands, Gopalakrishna, has negotiated a 5 year lease with us of Rs 9000 per month for the use of his land. (update on 21. Jul. 2009)

All three sources feed into the same pipe to the hilltop. The pipes feeding the tank are 10 years old and need to be replaced.

If there is no KEB power, neither srinivas nor backwash borewells would work. Sometimes, if the kaglipura KEB fails, there is power in the srinivas farm. The borewell in baskar's plot can but run but will require 75 hours to fill the tank.

There is no access to the hilltop to fill it up by tankers.

(d) a fourth source of water is from the panchayat borewell. although all connections have been done, this borewell is also dependent on the kaglipura KEB power source. therefore this source has not been activated as it does not serve any purpose right now. If we lose access to backwash, this would need to be activated. Update on 17.Jul.2009 -> since the backwash water supply was cut, this option has been activated. The yeild of this is approx 10,000 litres per hour.