Wasa covers approximately 470 square kilometres including the metropolitan city but has no statistics of illegal connections. Wasa has a current system loss of 44 percent of which 20 percent is misused because of technical reasons. Illegal connections are the main causes to the rest of the system loss.

The WASA board decided to do a consumer survey as a part of modernising the established working and circulation system, to find out the number of illegal water connections in the capital this August. But as the floods cover most areas covered by Wasa the implementation of the survey work awaits the return of the climatic conditions to normalcy.

It is said that there are 3,60,000 holdings in the city but only 2,16,000 have legal water connection lines. Twenty percent of the legal lines belong to commercial users and the rest to residents. But the Mayor Sadeque Hossain Khoka recently said that the number of householders is 2,00,000 over the city, so without a firsthand survey, the exact numbers cannot be found, said ANH Akhter Hossain, Managing Director (MD) of WASA.

Wasa had given an opportunity to those having illegal water supply connections to legalise them before February 15 this year and many subscribers made use of the opportunity.

"I legalised the water supply line making use of this opportunity," said Ahmed Munir, a resident of Shaikhertek in the Mohammedp-ur area.

"Wasa's cost legalisation is too high and once you confess, you are bound to either pay bills from the day the building came up or else from the inception of Wasa or better so according to the whims and fancies of the officers," said another illegal connection holder from Mirpur.

"Although I communicated with the authorities I failed to get a connection to my residence within a reasonable period of time. When the local lineman assured me of assistance to solve the problem if he was paid a certain amount of money, I decided to go along with him," he added.

"It is not possible to launch the survey to identify the real statistics on Wasa subscribers during the floods. I think most of the illegal connections in Dhaka are in Mirpur as there are many slums on encroached land," said the Wasa MD.

"Illegal connections are widespread not only in Mirpur but in most parts of the expanded city as well. We will try to bring down the numbers after a proper survey but have to wait for the floods to recede," he added.