Water tank built at cost of Rs 5.31 crore, quenching thirst of 5,000 villagers collapses in UP's Sitapur

LUCKNOW: In Sitapur district, where eight villages lean on a single water tank to slake the thirst of over 5,000 souls, hope crumbled like brittle clay on Thursday. The 3,500-litre zincalume tank in Chunkaw Behema, a lifeline built under the ambitious Har Ghar Jal Yojana.

This wasn’t just a structural failure—it was the second tank collapse in Sitapur and the fifth in Uttar Pradesh, exposing cracks in the state’s quest to deliver clean water to every home.

The tank was built at the cost of Rs 5.31 crore and commissioned in January 2024. Its 18 km long pipe snaked through dusty lanes, feeding 845 households across Chunkaw Behema and seven neighbouring villages.“The tank folded like a deck of cards,” said Shatrohan Lal, the guard of the water tank facility.Har Ghar Jal Yojana is a flagship scheme under the Jal Jeevan Mission to provide tap water to rural India. The mission has tested 16,000 tanks, but five failures—two in Sitapur, one in Lakhimpur Kheri this April, and two others elsewhere—have cast a long shadow.The State Water and Sanitation Mission (SWSM), stung by the fiasco took action, and 12 employees—from junior engineers to assistant engineers of the Rural Water Corporation and the Mission itself—were either suspended or dismissed.

The construction agency, NCC Limited, was blacklisted, as was the third-party inspection firm that had greenlit the project. A 5% liquidated damages penalty was slapped on NCC, a financial sting to match the public outrage.Spokesperson of the SWSM said, “The zincalume tank under the Chunka Behma in Sitapur’s Vikas Khand Pehla collapsed on Thursday. Action has been taken by the department against officials, issued blacklisting notices to NCC and the inspection agency, and ordered a probe.”The executive engineer Rajiv Kumar has been served chargesheet and departmental inquiry has been initiated against him, assistant engineer Sanjeet Yadav, and junior engineer Saurab Singh Yadav have been suspended, while the district’s third-party inspection head was sacked on the spot.To dig deeper, the Mission formed a high-level committee—comprising a Chief Engineer from the Rural Water Corporation, another from the Mission, and a Superintending Engineer—tasked with delivering a report within three days.Meanwhile, Additional Chief Secretary Anurag Srivastav, the Mission’s director, ordered a technical audit of all Har Ghar Jal tanks in Sitapur, a move to prevent further disasters in a district already reeling from last year’s collapse.