Sewage treatment has been receiving attention from authorities since long. Central Public Health Engineering and Environment Organisation (CPHEEO) has been the nodal technical organisation for sewage treatment and technologies helping various state boards and local governments for decades.
Despite grand plans for treatment of all sewage generated in the country is far from successful. NGT under the authority of Supreme Court has been pressing local and state governments with limited success and has now imposed “penalty “in form of a “ring fenced “amount to be earmarked by state government for creating needful infrastructure and ecosystem for total management in a short period.
Pragmatic actions
-Work out end to end costs including health and environment for collection, conveyance and treatment of sewage
-Plan for metering sewage discharged in the pipeline by individual waste generator
-Apply Polluter Pays Principle and recover all the charges from waste generators in proportion to quantum
-Standardise several models of package sewage treatment plants proven successful for commercial tendering and bring them on GEM platform
-Standardise STPs of of small to medium sizes and find ways to bring them on common rate contracts or GEM platforms for seamless and quick installation
-Encourage decentralised and localised STPs to reduce conveyance costs
-Encourage leasing of wastelands and wasted (surplus lands with trusts, temples, waqf boards, enterprises, institutions, government departments, farmers etc) for processing facility all over the country
-Revisit Guj Govt policy of “reuse of treated wastewater “and remove the roadblocks to attract entrepreneurs in pure business mode
-Give the flexibility of pricing of treated sewage to industries and institutions to entrepreneurs
-Quickly adopt successful business models as in case of Surat Muni Corporation and promote them aggressively
-Treated sewage found nutrient rich by most farmers and hence business models and enterprises capturing hidden values of sewage through proper technology to be encouraged
-Ban groundwater extraction in agreed time frame to force institutional and industrial users to treat and reuse their own Wastewater or buy treated sewage of requisite norms from private treatment plants
-Throw open sewage business to all new technologies for demonstration at the cost of the entrepreneurs for one year and agreed payment on success
-Plan in totality for conveyance (pipe network) and treatment plants to make optimal use of investment
-Fasten liability and stiff penalty on defaulting local governments or employees
S B Dangayach
Founder Trustee
Innovative Thought Forum
www.itf-india.com
sbdangayach@gmail.com
+919998822680