LAHORE, Jan 8: The Water and Sanitaion Agency managing director has ordered strict disciplinary action against 250 inspectors and meter readers for failure to report the existence of over 43,500 illegal water connections detected during the ongoing survey.

Wasa chief Imran Raza Zaidi believes that the inspectors and meter readers were aware of the existence of the illegal water supply connections detected by 171 teams during the first door-to-door survey in progress since October last but did not report to their superiors for proper action against those involved in water theft. They connived in the installation of unauthorized connection for personal benefits causing huge financial loss to Wasa.

The agency had to suffer losses running into millions of rupees due to the unauthorized water connections constituting about 10 per cent of the 443,000 authorized.

Minimum monthly loss calculated at a nominal rate of Rs100 per month for 43,500 connections detected so far comes to Rs4.35 million.

The number of unauthorized connections continue to swell as the survey is still in progress and hundreds of connections are being detected daily. Another 10,000 or more unauthorised connections are expected to be detected till the completion of the survey.

According to the reports submitted by the survey teams to the Wasa chief till Tuesday, a maximum number of 6,700 unauthorised connections were detected in Baghbanpura, Moghalpura and the Lahore Township Industrial Area followed by 4,500 connections detected in Shahdara and Ravi Road. Survey of Gulberg and Ichhra resulted in detection of 4,000 connections.

As many as 3,700 connections were found in Data Nagar and Misri Shah and 2,300 in Mozang and Garden Town. The number of unauthorized connections detected in Allama Iqbal Town and Krishan Nagar was 2,200 and Shimla Pahari, Samanabad and Dharampura had 1,900 connections. Green Town, Township and the Walled City had the minimum number of 1,500 connections.

A team headed by the revenue director also detected 2,300 connections during random surveys of different parts of the city. And last but not the least, the maximum number of 14,000 unauthorized connections were reported by the consumers themselves.