Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are given in quoted form to help you locate them.
In many Indian cities, nearly a third of the water that a municipal utility treats and pumps never earns it a rupee. Engineers call this 'non-revenue water', a dull phrase for a costly failure. Some of it seeps out of corroded pipes laid half a century ago; some is drawn through illegal connections; and some is simply never billed because meters are broken or missing. For years the standard response was to build bigger reservoirs and draw more from distant rivers, an approach that treated the symptom while the leaks continued to multiply underground.
A mid-sized city in the western part of the country chose a different path. Rather than seek fresh sources, its water department divided the city into some forty district metered areas, small zones whose inflow and outflow could be measured separately. Once each zone had its own meter at the entrance, the difference between the water entering it and the water billed within it could be calculated every month. Zones where the gap was large were inspected street by street, and crews equipped with acoustic sensors listened for the faint hiss of water escaping beneath the road at night, when demand was low and leaks were easier to detect.
The approach was hardly 'glamorous', and it initially met resistance from within the department itself. Junior engineers complained that they were being turned into 'plumbers with laptops', while some councillors worried that cracking down on illegal connections in poorer neighbourhoods would cost them votes. The department responded by offering to 'regularise' informal connections at a nominal fee, on the condition that households accepted a meter. To the surprise of many, most families agreed. They had been paying private tanker operators far more for unreliable supplies than the utility now asked for a regular one.
Within five years, the share of non-revenue water had fallen by roughly half. The savings were not only financial. Water that had previously leaked away was now available to neighbourhoods that had received supply for barely an hour a day, and several of them began to receive it for six. The utility, which had once depended on state grants to pay its electricity bills, began to cover its operating costs from its own revenue.
The lesson is not that every city can repeat these figures, for the condition of pipes and the politics of each place differ widely. It is rather that the most valuable new source of water may already lie beneath a city's streets, waiting to be measured rather than discovered.
Q1.Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as a cause of non-revenue water?
- Water that is never billed because meters are broken
- Leakage from corroded pipes laid decades ago
- Evaporation from open reservoirs during summer
- Water drawn through illegal connections
- Water that is never billed because meters are missing
Q2.Why does the author say that the standard response 'treated the symptom'?
- Because it punished poor households for the faults of the utility
- Because it increased the supply of water without stopping the losses that kept growing underground
- Because distant rivers were themselves polluted and unfit for supply
- Because it focused on billing households instead of repairing reservoirs
- Because it relied on acoustic sensors that could not find every leak
Q3.According to the passage, why did the crews listen for leaks at night?
- Because the meters at zone entrances recorded data only at night
- Because illegal connections were used mainly at night
- Because the roads could be dug up only when there was no traffic
- Because the junior engineers refused to work during the day
- Because demand was low at night and leaks were easier to detect