VA Tech Wabag, the Chennai headquartered water treatment company, having bagged Rs.3,000 crore worth of new orders in the first nine months this year, is seeing large opportunities in sea water desalination and municipal waste water recycling projects across India and abroad.
“We are seeing large opportunities for alternative source of water that is sea water desalination and reuse of municipal waste water. This opportunity is emerging very rapidly” Rajiv Mittal, Managing Director, VA Tech Wabag, told The Hindu .
“Chennai has gone far ahead in both these areas. Today, almost 25 per cent of Chennai’s population is using desalinated water for drinking, and this ratio will go up to 50 per cent soon. The city is also talking about using treated municipal waste water in large scale for use in construction. Chennai today has emerged as an example for the rest of the country where water scarcity is acute,” Mr. Mittal said. Without quantifying the opportunity in financial terms, he said many coastal states such as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala were planning big desalination plants. Similarly, all municipalities in Tier-1 cities such as Mumbai and Delhi were rapidly scaling up the reuse of municipal waste water for consumption in industrial and construction sectors as well as for consumption by animals. Apart from India, Wabag is finding large markets in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan region and Latin America. “In Asia, we are rapidly growing in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia,” Mr. Mittal said.
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For the quarter ended December 31, 2013, the company reported a net profit of Rs.21.41 crore as compared to Rs.10.04 crore in the year-ago period.