Some taps in your locality are left open all day resulting in a tremendous waste of water. Write a letter to the Municipal Commissioner of your town / city, complaining about the problem. Suggest ways in which this waste of water can be prevented.

MODEL ANSWER

Flat 67, A.D.A. Colony Stanly Road Allahabad 211001

2 March 2020

The Municipal Commissioner Municipal Corporation Allahabad 211003

Subject: Wastage of water from public taps in A.D.A. Colony

Sir,

I wish to bring to your notice a serious and continuing wastage of water from the public taps in our locality.

There are eight public taps serving the settlement adjoining A.D.A. Colony, and several of them are left running throughout the day and night. Three have broken washers and can no longer be closed at all. The water runs into the lane, where it stands and breeds mosquitoes, and by April the same locality will be queuing for tankers. A newspaper report last month estimated that a single tap left open wastes over a thousand litres a day; eight would supply a large part of this neighbourhood.

May I respectfully suggest the following remedies:

1. The defective taps may be repaired or replaced, and self-closing (spring-loaded) taps fitted, which shut automatically when released.
2. Fixed supply hours, displayed on a board at each tap, would prevent water running through the night.
3. A caretaker from among the residents may be made responsible for each tap, and a small penalty imposed for leaving one open.
4. A short awareness campaign in the locality, with the help of the residents’ association and local schools, would do more than any penalty.

I shall be grateful if the matter is looked into before the summer sets in. The residents are willing to assist your office in any way required.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully, A. Saleem (Secretary, A.D.A. Colony Residents’ Association)

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

TWO tasks, and the second is compulsory:

1. COMPLAIN about the wastage — with concrete detail, not general lament
2. SUGGEST WAYS the waste can be PREVENTED

A letter that only complains cannot earn full content marks. Number the suggestions so the examiner sees them at a glance.

MAKE THE SUGGESTIONS PRACTICAL AND VARIED. Notice that the model offers four different KINDS of remedy — engineering (self-closing taps), administrative (fixed hours), social (a caretaker) and educational (awareness). Four versions of "repair the taps" would earn one mark, not four.

CONCRETE FIGURES strengthen a complaint: eight taps, three broken, a thousand litres a day. Vague grumbling is the commonest weakness in this letter type.

REGISTER: courteous and impersonal. No sarcasm, no exclamation marks, no accusations. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see the Formal Letter and Informal Letter references in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.