Cuttack: About half of the cold drinking water supply units that existed across the city by the end of 2016-17 have become defunct.

During 2017-18, the Public Health Engineering Organisation (Pheo) had set up 20 cold water outlets across the city with MPLAD funds. Some 39 such units existed before that.

As part of the summer action plan, Pheo made a survey of the 39 units to assess their condition.

Pheo's Cuttack division executive engineer Sushant Ghadei on Sunday said 16 of the 39 cold water units had become defunct. "We will recharge those that can be repaired by March end. Units that are beyond repair will be left in their present condition till funds are available to replace those," Ghadei said.

The summer action plan comprises making functional all cold water supply units here in addition to placing plastic tanks where there is no supply through pipelines along with additional plying of tankers to meet the demand. The action plan includes ensuring functioning of all hand pump tube wells.

Pheo officials said a pre-summer survey had detected that nearly 120 of the 600 odd tube wells with hand pumps are dysfunctional. They said steps were being taken to make the defunct tube wells functional by end of March.

Pheo had started the process to place plastic 1,000-litre tanks at 130 locations to provide additional drinking water during summer. The plastic tanks will also be placed on iron frames by the end of this month.

"We plan to provide two plastic tanks in each of the 59 wards for additional supply of drinking water and additional tanks at locations of some wards where shortage of water supply due to decrease in flow of piped water was detected last year," Ghadei said.

Every day, the Pheo supplies around 102 million litres of drinking water drawn from various production wells through piped water system. An additional supply of over 1.3 lakh litres per day has been planned for this summer.