Silchar Dec. 25: The crisis of drinking water in Silchar is expected to be over when the new additional water treatment plant starts functioning.

Public health engineering minister Gautam Roy said that he, along with local Congress MP Sushmita Dev, would jointly lay the foundation stone of the plant expected to be functional by 2017, tomorrow at Daccaipatty Road near the old treatment plant here.

The new plant, which would have an underground water reservoir with a storage capacity of seven lakh million litres a day, would be able to churn out each day 6.89 litres of filtered drinking water.

Amitava Choudhury, an assistant engineer of the department in Cachar district, said the plant would have a state-of-art arrangement for filtering and sedimentation.

He also said the old water treatment plant, commissioned in 1975, would continue to function as it underwent a phase of renewed stabilisation in 2006, along with the new plant under construction.

The new plant would also have three elevated service reservoir tanks, each with a capacity to store 4.5 lakh litres of treated water, at Rongpur, Hospital road and Tarapur along with a reservoir inside the plant.

Choudhury said the 35km long underground water pipes would be repaired. The money for the construction would come from chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s special package of Rs 100 crore for the economic development of the three districts of Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi.

This would be the third scheme of potable drinking water for Silchar.

The first scheme was mooted in 1917. But this scheme, with a single water storage system, was scrapped when the second water treatment plant for this town, came into being in 1975.