Jaipur: Jaipur’s Danish-assisted pilot project for 24×7 water supply has been put on hold, with the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) discontinuing round-the-clock distribution in nine trial localities and reverting them to scheduled supply amid rising summer demand and limited water availability. PHED officials said continuous water supply has been stopped in all nine District Metered Areas (DMAs) where the pilot project had been running since June 2025. Water is now being distributed at fixed timings, similar to the rest of the city. According to department officials, water consumption has increased by 10-12% over the past two weeks due to soaring temperatures, making it difficult to sustain uninterrupted supply in select pockets while other areas face shortages. “The entire game is all about resources and availability of water. You cannot give running water at only nine localities and deny the consumers from other localities. We have decided to stop the service and are distributing water across the city as per the demand and supply of respective areas,” a senior PHED engineer said. The pilot project was launched under a memorandum of understanding signed on May 19, 2024, between the Rajasthan govt and Denmark’s Aarhus administration. The initiative aimed to introduce infrastructure and technology required for continuous water supply in selected areas of Jaipur, Udaipur and Nawalgarh. In Jaipur, the project covered nine District Metered Areas — Bajaj Nagar, Bani Park, Malviya Nagar, Vidhyadhar Nagar, Jawahar Nagar, Mansarovar, Nidhi Vihar, Shiv Vihar and Ashok Vihar. Officials, however, maintained that the project has not been abandoned. They described the move as a temporary pause in the trial phase rather than a formal shutdown. “It takes time to implement such projects permanently. We started it during the onset of the monsoon last year. We needed to carry out the trial for at least one year, especially peak summer months, to make sure that the project is feasible,” the engineer said. PHED expects to resume the pilot after the monsoon and believes the project’s long-term viability could improve once the proposed Ram Jal Setu Link Project augments Jaipur’s water resources. For now, the suspension of the Danish-assisted experiment highlights the challenge of implementing 24×7 water supply in a city where demand continues to outpace available resources during peak summer months.
