Borouge helps secure fresh water to every house in Malkapur village, India

Through their Water for the World™ initiative Borouge and Borealis, leading providers of innovative, value creating plastics solutions, are helping the State of Maharashtra in India to supply drinking water 24 hours per day, seven days a week to the residents of Malkapur village, 400km south of Mumbai.

Water for the World is the first global programme in the plastics industry that addresses the challenge of providing clean, safe water and sanitation to areas in need. More than one billion people around the world are without sustainable access to fresh water and over two billion lack basic sanitation.

Like many villages in rural India, Malkapur has an intermittent and inadequate water supply system which leaves its residents queuing many hours at public taps for their meagre share. The Maharashtra State government has a policy to improve this situation and provide a continuous water supply via a pipe system with a greatly reduced leakage rate.

Borouge, together with local pipe and fitting manufacturer Kimplas Piping System and EPC Industries a local pipe installer, are meeting this challenge by providing high quality PE100 polyethylene material for a new leak-free water supply system to the 3000 households in Malkapur.

The old water supply system, installed in 1988, was losing 35% of the treated water through leaks and was no longer adequate to serve the growing population of this sugar-producing region.

Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran (MJP), the Water Supply and Sewerage Board in the state of Maharashtra which finances and owns the project, required the new network to reduce water loss to less than 5%, and supply a projected population of 67,000 by 2030. MJP chose a polyethylene plastic water pipe system for its high quality and durability, made of BorSafe™ PE100 material from Borouge together with electrofusion fittings for leak free jointing. Both pipes and fittings were produced using black compounded PE100 material from Borouge who use advanced Borstar® technology to produce a bimodal, high density polyethylene ideally suited to pressure pipe systems. With an expected lifecycle of 100 years, it outperforms most traditional pipe materials.

Kimplas produced 53.55 km of water main pipes ranging in diameter from 75mm to 140mm, supplied in 100 metre long coils which significantly reduced the number of joints and speeded up the installation. EPC Industries installed the pipes and jointed them using electrofusion fittings in the six different water districts in Malkapur village.

Borouge Vice President Pipe, Andre van Uffelt says that Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran and Kimplas were careful in selecting the material: “It had to durable, resistant to corrosion, easy to install and easy to maintain and so they chose BorSafe HE3490-LS PE100 grade for its proven high quality standard.”

Mr van Uffelt adds that Malkapur is the first village in India ever to receive 24-hour water supply which government officials in Maharashtra State are carefully monitoring to use the experience as best practice for water supply projects in other villages throughout India.

This Malkapur water project will feature in a CNBC documentary scheduled for later in 2008.

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