Mayor Orders CCTV Watch on ₹2,161-Crore Sewer and Water Pipeline Works

Mayor Ashok Tiwari has directed Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam to place the ₹2,161-crore mega sewer and drinking-water pipeline project in 22 Varanasi wards under continuous CCTV watch, after a joint review with Varanasi Municipal Corporation and Varanasi Smart City Limited officials. The project covers 353.13 km of sewer lines and 651.64 km of drinking-water pipelines and is described by civic officials as a decades-long fix for overflow and waterlogging in old-city pockets near the Ganga ghats.

Tiwari said cameras must sit at every active work site and feed the Smart City control room, municipal headquarters and the mayor’s office so that pace and quality can be checked in real time. UPJN was told to file complete details of mainline and branch works, daily targets and regular progress reports, and was warned that negligence would not be tolerated. Municipal commissioner Himanshu Nagpal reiterated the length figures and the civic claim that the network should ease sewer overflow and waterlogging problems for roughly the next 70 years.

Groundbreaking ceremonies for packages under the project are scheduled for 20, 21 and 22 September 2026 at Sarainandan and Birdopur; Bhelupur and Durgakund; and Nariya and Jolha North, respectively. The mayor noted that the Prime Minister had laid the foundation for the ₹2,161-crore sewer-relining and water-supply package during an April 28 visit, and that UPJN had already begun work in some wards. Separately, the agency was asked to start sewer and drinking-water laying in Jangambari, Shivala, Nagwa and Bengali Tola, where bhoomi pujan is complete.

Damaged or low-capacity sewer and water lines are to be replaced with separated sewer, drainage and drinking-water pipelines, Tiwari said, acknowledging that residents will face temporary inconvenience during road cutting. That inconvenience line is part of the civic brief; it is not a licence for this desk to invent ward-wise outage calendars that UPJN has not published.

This piece is distinct from earlier copy on CCTV-watched work starting in four wards. Saturday’s stamp is the full mega-project monitoring order, the Smart City uplink, the six-locality groundbreaking calendar across 20–22 September, and the 22-ward length sheet. Readers should not collapse the two stories into one rewrite.

For households along the ghat-ward lanes, the near-term reality will be trenches, diversions and the promise of separated lines. For UPJN site engineers, it will be cameras linked to three civic screens plus daily targets on paper. For the mayor’s office, the test is whether the feed and the progress sheets actually catch delay and poor workmanship before monsoon 2027 returns.

Civic copy on Sunday morning therefore holds to the numbers and the calendar. Mayor Ashok Tiwari has ordered CCTV coverage of the ₹2,161-crore, 22-ward sewer and drinking-water project; UPJN must report daily; groundbreaking runs 20–22 September across six named localities; and commissioner Himanshu Nagpal’s length figures — 353.13 km sewer, 651.64 km water — remain the scale against which the cameras will watch.