While Nagpurians have been trying to recover from prolonged water disruption, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) and Orange City Water (OCW) has announced another 24-hour citywide shutdown on the 1,400 mm Pench-IV feeder, scheduled from 6 am on October 13 to 6 am on October 14. The move follows incomplete repairs on the pipeline near Mankapur Square, exposing chronic lapses in civic planning and project execution. The impending dry spell comes in the immediate wake of an agonising breakdown that began on October 6. Originally slated as a 36-hour planned shutdown to interconnect twin 1,400 mm pipelines near Mankapur Nullah under a World Bank-funded PWD division project, the work severely overshot its October 7 deadline, stretching past 60 hours.

 

Elevated service reservoirs ran completely dry across 20 command areas, leaving vast swathes of the city parched. Desperate citizens were forced to hunt for drinking water at filtration stations, borewells, and private water cans. Even when pumping resumed, multiple pockets battled dismal water pressure and murky tap discharge. The crisis had triggered severe political outrage, pulling up senior NMC’s Public Health Engineering (PHE) officials, and demanding accountability for the botched execution. It has now surfaced that the earlier restoration was merely an ad-hoc fix to pacify public anger, leaving crucial leak repairs and structural welding unaddressed. According to OCW’s official notification, the October 13 shutdown is mandatory to execute leakage repair work on the trunk feeder near Mankapur Square. However, the measure will sever piped water supply across 18 major command areas including Nara, Nari, Jaripatka, Laxmi Nagar, New Dhantoli, Omkar Nagar, Hudkeshwar, Nalanda Nagar, Sakkardara, and Balaji Nagar. With households once again pushed to the brink, the repeated disruption has cast serious doubt on the civic administration’s operational competence.