Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 118

Parameters of Successful Wastewater Reuse in Urban India
supply chain and reducing the amount
of untreated wastewater that contaminates
the good water of rivers and lakes.
The garden projects put treated wastewater
back into the soil where the soil
biology and oxygen treat the wastewater
even further. The projects also reduce
the need to make large extractions
of groundwater for horticulture. If
done on a larger scale, these substitutions
could have a noticeable effect on
groundwater tables.
Closed-Loop Business Savings
Two of the cases show that entities requiring
a large quantity of water on a
daily basis are more motivated to create
their own closed-loop systems and
become producers as well as consumers
over time. These wastewater reuse
projects create closed-loop systems in
the urban hydrosocial cycle. The IIT-M
project and the Renaissance hotel project
circulate water along a tighter path
through treatment to business/institution
use and then back into treatment.
In these two closed-loop projects,
there is a devolution of responsibility
for operating and maintaining the
facility to the local level. There is also
a devolution of control over water use
through the reuse of existing supply.
The local level means at the functioning
of the STP or within the business,
university, or housing society. In a business
such as the Renaissance hotel, the
hotel management is responsible for
operation and maintenance of the STP,
not the state-level engineering or water
agency as is the case with centralized
STPs (Alley 2002, 2014; Sanghi 2014).
Likewise at IIT-M, engineering professors
and their students are involved
in monitoring the facilities as they are
operated by university staff. This alters
the roles of consumers and transforms
them into operators and monitors.
They are generating their own resource
and then handling its reuse within their
own community. It is a closed loop of
responsibility, even though the requirement
to recycle comes from the state
and central pollution control boards,
the municipalities, and the NGT.
This paper has argued that wastewater
recycling is on the rise and can
lead to significant contributions to water
supply while reducing the pollution
load on precious surface waters. These
cases point attention to key parameters
of success that can be identified and
supported in other cases around India.
A flexible approach to assessment,
which takes success and failure in terms
of the interplay of key parameters, can
help to recognize specific areas of improvement
and build upon them, to
provide a greater sense of accomplishment
and motivation over time.
References
Alley, Kelly D. 2002. On the Banks of
the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a
Sacred River. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Alley, K. D. 2014. “Ganga and Varanasi’s
Waste-water Management: Why Has
It Remained Such an Intractable
Problem?” SANDRP South Asia Network
115