If the thought of using sewage water to garden your plants or flush your toilet makes you shudder, you are probably not alone. “There is a term called the yuck factor, and the term is there globally,” says Dr. Veena Srinivasan, the executive director of WELL Labs, a Bengaluru-based research and innovation centre for water management.
And yet, getting over this yuck factor is an important aspect of creating more sustainable water systems, as the recently concluded conference titled Building Water-Resilient Cities: Strategies for Wastewater Reuse in Urban India reiterated.
“There’s a psychological block,” agrees B.P. Ravi, IFS, Principal Secretary, Forests and Ecology, Government of Karnataka, who delivered the welcome address at this conference, a collaboration between WELL Labs, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG) and Bangalore Apartments Federation.
But he also indicated that we may soon have no other choice. “We are pumping water every day. About 1,500 million litres of water per, using energy against gravity,” says Mr. Ravi, adding that this is simply unsustainable in the long run. “The solutions are available, (but) change at the individual, family and community level needs to happen.”
Contradictory problems
“Bengaluru’s water problems may be contradictory,” states the executive summary of a report titled How Water Flows Through Bengaluru: Urban Water Balance Report, which was released at the conference. While this fast-expanding city, prone to drought and flooding, is getting increasingly dependent on groundwater, a fast-depleting resource, “the amount of wastewater treated by centralised infrastructure remains low”.
A decentralised wastewater treatment policy could be the way forward, going by Dr. Srinivasan’s comment at the launch of this report.
“Bangalore is unique for having a decentralised policy. If we’re able to make this a success, the city can show the rest of the world how to establish a circular water economy,” she states, adding that the point of the report was this: to think about the city’s water in an integrated fashion.
Panel discussions
The release of the report was followed by a series of panel discussions focusing on various facets of effective wastewater management.
From a session on planning and implementing effective wastewater strategy to others focusing on its economics, the standards and regulations around it, and potential business models, the conference drew on the knowledge of a number of eminent Indian and international experts.
A few of them were Eli Cohen, the CEO of Ayala Water and Ecology; Anant Kodavasal, the founder and director of Ecotech Engineering; Mr. V. Ramprasad, the founder of Friends of Lakes, Bengaluru; Mahesh T., the chief environmental officer at the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, and Dr. Christian Binz who is associated with Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.
What was eminently clear by the end of the conference — which also delved into the problems posed by non-functioning STPS, the need for wholehearted community participation, accountability, and the role of government agencies, policy and law — was this. “None of these things can be solved by incremental change,” as Dr Srinivasan points out. “You need an entire system.”
