Rajshahi WASA in the red: Consumers protest as it contemplates raising tariff

RAJSHAHI, Feb 13: The authorities of Rajshahi Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) is facing an acute financial crisis at the third year of its establishment. The expenditure of Rajshahi WASA has been redoubled than the income and there has been a huge outstanding bills from the clients. As a result, WASA authorities is finding it difficult to continue its services.
According to sources, Rajshahi WASA started its journey from August 2010. Earlier the water and the sewerage system of the city used to be managed by Rajshahi City Corporation.
It is learnt, as against a daily requirement of 118,077 cubic litre demand of water, WASA only supplies 55,440 cubic litre of water for 788,000 city dwellers through 30,263 household hydrants connected with 512-kilometre long pipeline. The water is fetched through 70 pump-houses and one water purification plant. Twenty more pump houses will soon be set up in the city to ease water supply to the dwellers.
Though the number of consumers of Rajshahi WASA was 29,000 at the starting the present number has been risen to 35,000. Due to non-payment of water bill for a long time by the consumers, the total outstanding bill of WASA now stands over Tk 80 million.
Sources of WASA further informed, the annual cost of WASA is nearly Tk 60 million but the annual recovery of water and sewerage bill is only Tk 20 million. Due to a huge outstanding bills, WASA is finding it difficult to continue with its activities and thinking seriously to increase rate of water supply, informed a source of WASA.
Meanwhile, Rajshahi WASA consumers have expressed an angry reaction over the decision to increase the water bill. They said, the water bill of WASA is already high and a 15 per cent of VAT is imposed on the bill which is also exorbitant as no other service body of the city charges so much VAT.
Dhiraj Kumar Nath, Managing Director of Rajshahi WASA informed, the recovery of water bill from the city consumers is very slow and insufficient. As a result, there has been a huge amount of outstanding bills from the city dwellers. He further said, it was hard to continue activities of WASA with so small recovery of bills. As a result, authorities of WASA was thinking to increase water bills for the city consumers.