The Kendrapada water project, designed to provide piped drinking water to nearly two lakh people across 146 villages, has missed its December 2025 completion deadline and is now expected to be finished by March 2027, according to officials quoted by Times of India.
The Rs 114-crore project covers Aul and Rajkanika blocks and is intended to address long-standing drinking-water shortages and salinity in the coastal Odisha district. The state government floated the tender in 2021, and the work was awarded to a construction company in March that year with a deadline of December 2025. About 70% of the work has been completed, the report said.
The project will draw water from the Kharasrota river. According to RWSS executive engineer Sujit Kumar Lugun, two intake wells have been constructed in the blocks and pipelines have been laid in several villages. He said the project is expected to be completed in March 2027 and would help address the region’s persistent drinking-water problem.
The missed deadline has frustrated residents, many of whom continue to depend on limited local sources. Sukant Das of Rajkanika said repeated requests to authorities to expedite the project had not produced results. Residents also said that the delay had prolonged acute drinking-water shortages in villages covered by the scheme.
Damodar Dhal, a retired schoolteacher from Tentulikoli village, alleged that the contractor had deployed very few workers, slowing construction. The report did not include a response from the construction company to that allegation.
In Jharamuha, retired schoolteacher Kaliprasad Nayak said residents of several villages were dependent on a few tubewells. He also said promises by political leaders to accelerate the project had not been fulfilled. The complaints point to the gap between the physical progress of a regional water scheme and the availability of reliable household-level supply for communities waiting for it to become operational.
The water problem is particularly severe in parts of Aul, where residents have reported groundwater depletion and salinity. Bhimasen Bhuyan, a lawyer from Bhuipur village, said tubewells there produced only saline water and that early completion of the project was crucial. These conditions have increased dependence on the delayed piped-water network.
The project’s revised March 2027 target means residents may have to wait more than a year beyond the original deadline for the planned system to become fully available. The report does not specify the reasons for the overall delay, the remaining contract milestones, or whether any penalties have been imposed.
For now, the stated next step is completion of the remaining work, including the expansion of the pipeline network and commissioning of the intake infrastructure. The RWSS has identified March 2027 as the new completion target.
