Planning For Water Supply Schemes:

The basic requirement of good planning of a water supply scheme is to ensure adequate amount of quality water supply to community as per their requirements at all the times of need. The necessary components of the scheme are treatment, collection, storage, transportation and distribution.

Searching and selection of a perennial source of water is the first step of the collection procedure. The source should be as near as practicable to the town or area where water is planned to be supplied. More frequent than not, only one source of supply will not be adequate to meet the quantity requirement and therefore more than one source required to be identified, e.g. augmentation of surface water source by exploiting the ground water. The designed water quality and quantity will depend on the requirement require, that may be different for different user groups. For instance, the quality and quantity of water requirement for drinking and domestic uses will be very much different for industrial use. Because natural water, as available from identified sources might not meet the quality standards prescribed for intended uses, some treatment of raw water is essentially required. The treatment process will also be different for different uses and for water from different sources. The water supply scheme including all its aspects of collection, storage, treatment and distribution is required to be so designed that it remains effective for a long life and be flexible enough to meet the changing requirements and increase in demand due to future development. The entire scheme should be easy to construct, economical to maintain and repair and constructed at minimum initial investment.