The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) is planning to set up a new 40 million-gallon-a-day (MGD) water treatment plant in Garden Reach.

It will cater to the needs of large housing complexes in the city, which mostly depend on underground water.

Mayor Firhad Hakim said the civic body wants to supply the water produced in this plant to fill the water reservoirs of the housing complexes and reduce their dependence on groundwater.

Once the design of the plant is ready, it will be sent to the state government for approval.

“We produce enough water to meet the needs of the city, barring some pockets. We are also adding capacity in the Dhapa water treatment plant and setting up a new
plant near Briji,” Hakim told Metro.

There is an existing plant at Garden Reach that produces 210 MGD every day.

“The new plant that we are planning at Garden Reach will meet the needs of the housing complexes. I want to fix a time every day when we can supply the water produced at this plant to the housing complexes,” Hakim said.

It was not immediately clear if the volume of water produced at the plant can be supplied to all housing complexes across the city or only to the ones in its command area.

The command area of the existing water treatment plant at Garden Reach includes Behala, Joka, Garden Reach, Alipore and Tollygunge, among others.

KMC sources said the 40MGD plant might take about three or three-and-a-half-years to complete from the start of construction of the plant.

The KMC has five water treatment plants that have
a combined capacity to produce 515 million gallons of water every day.

The existing KMC plants produce the following amount of water each day:

• Garden Reach 210 MGD
• Palta 262 MGD
• Watgunge 5 MGD
• Dhapa 30 MGD
• Jorabagan 8 MGD

Work on expanding the capacity at Dhapa by another 20 MGD is underway.

A new water treatment plant with 10 MGD capacity is under construction at Fartabad, near New Garia.

Hakim has said that the Fartabad plant will be commissioned during the summer of 2026.

“We will commission the Fartabad plant this summer, but the expansion at Dhapa will take some more time,” said a KMC official involved in the projects.

Hakim told the newspaper that the funding of the proposed plant at Garden Reach might come from the state government, or the KMC may explore schemes where both the state and the Centre have shares. “Funding can be arranged,” he said.

KMC sources said they were yet to fix the proposed cost of the plant.

The 10MGD plant at Briji has a project cost of ₹78.5 crore.

“The challenges and characteristics of the two projects are different. It will not be right to say the 40MGD plant will cost just four times the cost of the 10MGD plant,” the official said.