KEIIP Works

Water supply and sewerage services in Kolkata have excelled the national average, particularly in terms of quality, continuity, and coverage. The city also has a good, low-cost sewage treatment system. However, service provision is not uniform across the city and is increasingly strained by economic expansion. Service is better in the city center than in the periphery. This is both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is that the number of vulnerable households has grown rapidly in the periphery as the population has declined in the center, which is subserviced. The opportunity arises from the KMC's ability to generate revenues from a still-large population with higher income in the center, with which to fund investment in the periphery. The city has worked hard to narrow service disparities. Efforts started with two loans provided in 2000 and 2006 for the Kolkata Environmental Improvement Project (KEIP), which financed the renovation of 564 kilometers (km) of the sewer drain network and the rehabilitation of three sewage treatment plants, raising the percentage of the population with direct sewer connection from 31% in 2001 to 43% in 2011. The service coverage for water supply is higher than for sewerage, but disparities between central and peripheral areas remain, particularly in service continuity. Unless addressed rapidly, these disparities will widen as population shifts from the center to the periphery. Kolkata Municipal Corporation (the Executing Agency) through its Project Management Unit (the Implementing Agency) is implementing the Tranches of “Kolkata Environmental Improvement Investment Program” (KEIIP) after the sucessful completion of it's first chapter i.e KEIP- Kolkata Environmental Improvement Project.