Calcutta: A water treatment plant that will cater to around 8.6 lakh residents of seven municipal areas in Hooghly will come up in Uttarpara.

The municipal areas that will benefit from the 55 million-gallon-a-day (MGD) plant are Uttarpara-Kotrung, Konnagar, Dankuni, Rishra, Baidyabati, Serampore and Champdani.

The areas, except the one under Dankuni Municipality, now get water from a 20MGD plant in Serampore, which was set up in the early 1990s.

"The plant will come up on a seven-acre plot. The tender has been floated and we will select a contractor soon. The plant has to be ready within three years of starting work," said an engineer of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA), the implementing agency of the project.

The state government will fund the Rs 1,576-crore project, which includes setting up of 950km of underground pipes to areas that do not get surface water.

An intake jetty will be built close to the plant. It will supply water from the Hooghly to the plant for treatment.

Bappadittya Chatterjee, the chairman of Konnagar Municipality, said over the phone that residents of large swathes under his civic body were dependent on groundwater. "Prolonged use of groundwater has exposed them to arsenic poisoning. We want the Uttarpara project to be completed at the earliest," he said.

An engineer at the Calcutta Municipal Corporation said the only way to draw aresenic-free groundwater was to dig deep till the third or fourth aquifer (body of permeable rocks that contain water).

A CMDA official said the capacity of the existing water treatment plant - 20MGD - was "grossly inadequate" compared with the demand. The Uttarpara project has been conceived keeping in mind that an adult needs 135 litre of water daily.

The CMDA is also building a 27MGD treatment plant in Sonarpur for the residents of the Rajpur-Sonarpur municipal area.