| |March 20209But we will not stop drawing ground-water unless we have better, easier op-tions. This means investing in irrigation networks, adopting newer & better recy-cling technologies and closely monitor-ing water supply, demand and wastage. To start, we must move to crops that use less water in water-stressed areas for sure and enable farmers with technol-ogy to ensure wastage is reduced. For many farmers, the most high-tech option they have is still building bunds! But as you can see - this is now in the realm of policy-makers and bureaucracy. In oth-er words, it will take time to implement across the country. In developing countries like India, ur-ban population growth is more than twice the rate of overall population growth. Reports say up to 200,000 peo-ple migrate from rural India to cities and towns areas every day ­ which means less water/head every single day. So we need to move fast. Below are a few (ob-vious) things we need to address.PRICING & LEAKAGE I don't have a report on this for India - but the USA wastes 20 billion litres of water every day just from leaks. So for India, it is not unfair to assume that things are as bad or worse - we have wa-ter pipelines that thousands of litres of water every day that remain unfixed for weeks on end. Many of our pipelines are decades old so there is no point blaming anyone - but we need to prioritize fixing water pipes. It is not just the leakage - when a pipe is broken, it means external contaminants can enter the water supply line - imagine a broken pipeline along-side a broken sewage line. Remember, a drop a second is 130 litres a year - so you can imagine the scale. For tankers running across the cities - we already pay a slightly higher price. But city supply does not usually include the total cost of infrastructure, treatment and disposal - that is perhaps why most cities do not have sufficient budgets to maintain and upgrade the supply lines and even set up treatment plants. I might rake up a mini storm here - but we need to charge more for the government to make water supply fair and sustainable. A lot of countries charge for the water disposal as well - so there is metering for both incoming and outgoing water from a house! Installing water meters at the individual home level, across apartment complexes will be a good first step. DECENTRALIZED TREATMENT SYSTEMSAccording to estimates, major Indian cities have less than 30% sewage treat-ment capacity currently. Though most large cities have centralized wastewater treatment systems - they were mostly set up a long time ago and most of them can't process current wastewater vol-umes. How do we reduce the load? We can't, till we reduce consumption - but since the urban growth rate is so high, this is not an avenue we can explore. Sewage lines were also set up several years ago and in some cases decades ago, sewage line connections to these centralized recycling plants don't exist - so large sections of society remain un-covered by these treatment plants. Though capital intensive, we need to set up more centralized treatment plants for sure - maybe at ward level. But to re-duce the load and improve the efficiency of treatment and filtration - we need to make decentralized recycling systems (at building level) mandatory - they are in some cities like Bangalore, where it is implemented to a large extent. But this needs to be the norm and implementa-tion must be made mandatory for ex-isting buildings as well, even for small towns. So we can reduce consumption, reclaim and reuse whatever we can, and discharge pre-treated water to central-ized treatment facilities, so they run more efficiently.RAIN & SURFACE-RUNOFF HARVESTINGWe need to be future-focused - think a century ahead. We need a more sus-tainable plan. That will not be possible without harvesting rain and surface run-off water and using it to recharge our de-pleted wells, lakes and aquifers. Simple calculations can be made for projected demand for, say, 2050 and build trenches and tanks to harvest rain-water at build-ing level and community/ward level. If done well, over a few seasons - we will be able to see a dramatic improvement in water table levels. That is the only sus-tainable way for us to go forward. Yes, we may be generating water out of thin air - but we can't place bets on that just as yet. To summarize, policy-level changes to make agricultural irrigation more ef-ficient, invest in distribution infrastruc-ture, decentralized treatment systems at building complex levels and rain/surface run-off harvesting systems along with increased water tariffs to ensure main-tenance and technology upgrades for water treatment & distribution are taken into account - will make things better for our future generations. Let our future generation not ask us - hum kahaathanaa? Sudeep Nadukkandy, CEO and Co-founder
< Page 8 | Page 10 >