Cuttack, Feb. 13: The slow pace of replacing the leaking water pipelines by the public health engineering department has worsened the jaundice scenario in the city.

Pipelines carrying drinking water are running close to drains and often dirty water is seeping into these supply lines. This has resulted in the outbreak of jaundice in the city. Incidents of people suffering from jaundice have been reported from eight localities in the past eight days.

'Over the past one week, 474 drinking water pipeline leakage points have been detected in the areas from where jaundice cases have been reported. But, replacement of pipeline has been done in 198 such points,' Cuttack collector Nirmal Chandra Mishra said.

'What has added to our problem is that many of these pipelines are buried under silt in the drains. Unless the Cuttack Municipal Corporation removes the sludge from the drains, it is becoming difficult for us to replace the pipelines,' said executive engineer of the department Arun Nayak.

However, municipal commissioner Gyanaranjan Das said: 'Silt deposits should not be a problem for work on the pipelines passing through drains as job is on to clear the water channels and the branch drains. Besides, we have deployed seven persons to take up the de-siltation job at every location where the department wants to take up the pipeline replacement work.'

'The government has already been moved to provide Rs 15-crore contingency fund to fix leaking and corroding pipelines,' the collector said.

Though the department had started replacing the old pipelines in the affected pockets, a few officials, however, expressed concern over the lack of a concrete action plan that should be implemented to prevent such outbreaks in future.

'Contamination of drinking water due to leakage in pipelines is the only cause of the jaundice outbreak in the city. Since it will take some time to replace the old pipelines, we are appealing to the public to consume boiled cool water,' chief district medical officer (Cuttack) Dr Prafulla Behera told The Telegraph.

'Besides, 250 health workers have been provided with 1,000 water purifier halogen tablets each to distribute among the people in the affected areas to use them while drinking water,' he said.

Earlier after the spate of jaundice deaths in Sambalpur, the Cuttack district administration had, as a precautionary measure in the first week of January, divided the city into 10 zones and 20 teams consisting of the department officials, health officials, civic officials and councillors to check pipelines from the main supply to the domestic ones.

As the pipelines running under the roads will not be possible to examine immediately, focus was shifted to those near the drains, and along them. Domestic connections are also being checked to detect leakages and prevent possible contamination.

But, the checking process had only covered two of the 59 wards by the time jaundice outbreak took place in the city a week ago, sources said.

'Most of the points, where leakage in the pipelines has been detected so far, are in service connections to households, and several of them have been found to be unauthorised connections,' head of the standing committee for public health, water supply and drainage Ranjan Biswal told The Telegraph.

The preventive measures are being matched by intensive chlorination of piped water and other drinking water sources. 'Though the elaborate process of chlorination has begun, the purified water is not reaching the households due to multiple leakage points on the pipelines,' said the department's executive engineer.