Bhubaneswar, Sept. 20: The state government has sanctioned various posts in eight categories to make the Water Corporation of Odisha (Watco) operational, which will look into service delivery and efficiency of water and wastewater management in the city.

Watco is a public sector unit of the government formed under the Companies Act, 2013, to improve water supply and sewerage services for residents of Bhubaneswar and Jatni, during 2015.

Earlier, it was looking after a few projects of the Public Health Engineering Organisation (Pheo), including helping the organisation in making plans in geo-tagging various water supply utilities here. Watco was functioning with the staff of Pheo.

However, from now, it will act as an independent agency, which will work in collaboration with Pheo. 'Watco will help to reduce Pheo's workload and look after certain projects and the service delivery system. A meeting will be held to divide the work accordingly,' said Pheo superintending engineer C.R. Jena.

The housing and urban development department has sanctioned posts in eight categories for Watco, including one managing director, two directors, three general managers, two managers, 14 executive managers, 22 assistant managers, 22 junior managers and three divisional accounts officers. It will have a staff strength of 69.

'We have created the posts and forwarded the proposal to the finance department for approval. The scale of pay for each post has been mentioned. Once the posts and scales are approved, we will start recruitment. It will take three months to fill up the posts,' said a housing and urban development official.

The official said the department had prepared the service-level benchmark, performance-based service contract and financial regulations for Watco. 'We have finished all modalities to make it operational. We are hopeful that Watco will start functioning in six months if the approval comes on time,' said the official.

A source said the government was likely to confer the work of installing household water metres to Watco. 'We have initiated the process to finalise the type of water metres to be installed in households. A tender will be floated and the work will be executed under Watco,' said the official.

Pheo supplies 295 million litres of water per day to households. Of that, about 50 per cent is non-revenue water, which accounts for loss of water during transition and theft by households and private tankers. Pheo plans to increase revenue generation and stop loss of water by installing metres.