A seven-year-long dispute over sharing filtered surface water between Calcutta and Salt Lake was settled on Monday evening.

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who put the Rs 15-crore treatment plant into operation, announced that 10 million gallons from the newly-commissioned 40-million-gallon-daily (MGD)-capacity plant will be supplied to the Salt Lake and South Dum Dum municipal areas.

With this, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC)?s total supply of filtered surface water to the Salt Lake and South Dum Dum areas will be 20 million gallons a day.

This, for now, is enough to meet their daily demand.

Under pressure from the state government, the CMC has been supplying 10 MGD to the municipal areas for the past seven years, when the 20-MGD treatment plant was added to Palta in 1997-end.

The state government had held that it had financed the 20-MGD augmentation plant on condition that water would be given to Salt Lake and South Dum Dum municipalities.

The CMC, on the other hand, claimed that there was no such condition to getting the financial grant.

Subsequently, it was settled that the CMC, in the first phase, will supply 10 MGD filtered water to those municipalities, and the remaining 10 million gallons will be supplied after commissioning another 40-MGD plant in Palta.

Inaugurating the new plant at Palta, Bhattacharjee repeatedly urged municipal affairs minister Asok Bhattacharya and mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya to make arrangements for another small treatment plant in Palta to meets the demands of localities adjacent to the waterworks.

?Only people living in Calcutta cannot enjoy the benefits of treated water produced in Palta, while local people are deprived of it,? he said.

Praising the foresight of the British, the chief minister said they had started Palta waterworks in 1868, when Calcutta?s population was only 50,000, with a meagre six MGD plant.

Yet, they had acquired a vast area, which has made it possible to raise the daily capacity of the waterworks to 260 million gallons.

Municipal affairs minister Bhattacharya said the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority had taken up a comprehensive water supply scheme to phase out deep tubewells in the Calcutta Metropolitan Area (CMA) by 2010.