New Delhi, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday announced the ‘Water Arrears Waiver Scheme’, which will help Delhi government fix the root cause of compounding arrears that lie in the Delhi Jal Board’s (DJB) inefficiency and faulty billing. Addressing the mediapersons, Mr Kejriwal said, ‘We are announcing a scheme today to waive arrears to clean up the DJB’s books. Some of these arrears are due to consumers but some are also due to incorrect billing.” ‘The Delhi government is fixing the root cause of compounding arrears that lie in the DJB’s inefficiency and faulty billing. This could therefore be the last such scheme. This is a big difference between this and previous schemes,’ Mr Kejriwal, who is also the DJB chief, said. “For different levels of housing, there is a waiver of 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 75 per cent and 100 per cent. Consumers will get the waiver only when they pay the rest of the bills in up to three installments. The DJB expects to recover Rs 600 crore revenue through this scheme,’ he said. “This is an open invite to the people of Delhi to join the mainstream and install water meters. Only those consumers who have installed meters before November 30 will get the benefit of this scheme,’ the CM said. “The number of metered connections have increased by 25 per cent since 2014-15 from 19 lakh to 23 lakh.

This has brought people into the system and increased revenues for DJB,’ he said. “Before 2015, Delhi used to have expensive water supply, but DJB’s revenues were constantly declining. In 2014-15 the revenue was just Rs 1219 crore. Today the revenues stand at Rs 1819 crore,” said the CM. On leakages and water theft, Mr Kejriwal said, “We have installed flowmeters on a large scale to put an end to illegal theft and leakages. We are bringing this water into the system to streamline and improve supply of water.” “We have increased production of water by 14 per cent in five years by activating many WTPs. Many projects for further increase in capacity are underway,’ he said. “Delhi had primitive infrastructure before 2015- Only 58 per cent colonies had water pipelines, while the rest had supply through tankers. After 70 years of independence, only half of Delhi had piped water. Today we have covered 93 per cent of Delhi,’ he added.