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Binding with soil, water and energy
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Sustaining rural-urban India is essentially from our fundamental understanding of the physics of water and energy, says BCIL’s Chandrashekar Hariharan, in a free-wheeling interview on the status of water supply in India, with Ranjani Govind
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Photo: G. Karthikeyan
Know what it is: One must understand the physics of water and energy.
The turn around from a chartered accountant to an alternative technology expert couldn’t have been more triumphant for Chandrashekar Hariharan, CEO, Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd., (BCIL). He has spent more than two decades working on what he calls “the installation of green virtues in bare brick-and-mortar living.”
PropertyPlus
caught up with Chandrashekar Hariharan for a detailed chat BCIL’s projects are known to be totally self-sufficient in water needs, thanks to recycling technology. “We do not take municipal water supply into account for our needs,” Hariharan proudly says. “However, water connections will be through in every project as nothing can be prophesied with regard to sustainability and changing needs,” he reiterates.
Earlier Hariharan has cherished his association with watersheds in Uttaranchal, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Nagaland. Yet another noticeable effort was his treatment of sewage/sullage water in the city with chemical-free, baffles-based tanks that considerably reduced the Total Dissolved Salts in the wastewater before reaching the streams and rivers.
You have been associated with several governments for water-related work. What are the factors that now dog India, according to you, for providing safe and accessible water supply sanitation (WSS)?
Healthy, continuous water supply is part of a global campaign today. The U.N. set an ambitious target, at the turn of century, of reaching such a goal by 2015.
What is the basic challenge today in the districts of India or in urban India for providing safe and accessible water supply and sanitation? A very stark crisis that is looming large ahead of us is water for cultivation.
I will not delve into the statistics which can be mind-boggling; it is before you every time a farmers’ agitation hits the headlines on a river and riparian rights that deny farmers in one State of river water that is flowing from another.
Karnataka’s Cauvery water and the agitations of farmers in Tamil Nadu is only one of the many examples.
Dams choke people’s lives and the remote ecosystems get fragile. This puts a new twist to the 100-year-old practice of providing large-scale irrigation with water stored in such projects across India. Eco-activists have also been vigilant to more such dams coming up. While dams of the large kind are not the solution for providing irrigation water to our farmers, the challenge of providing water for the second crop to the farmer has only grown.
What are the solutions?
* The solution at the urban level is clearly not having new sources of water, but rationalising the use of water, as communities, as cities and as governments.
* The most practical way to achieve efficient urban water supply is to see that you treat and re-use water in a way that your non-potable needs are met with such treated water.
* The good news is that nearly 70 per cent of water needs in any urban housing area or in office blocks is clearly for non-potable use, which is easily met with treated water.
* The technology available for quality water treatment has grown sharply in recent years.
There are companies that have cropped up with many different treatment options at reasonable costs for such treatment and re-use. The government, through the Central Pollution Control Board, has made it mandatory for builders to create tertiary sewage treatment plant for re-use of water. All this augurs well for sensible use of water in the years ahead, with drop in demand for fresh water.
* Regulation today in the building industry does not yet cover the installation of dual plumbing lines in large residential projects for treatment and use of treated waste-water for flush tanks and gardens with separate plumbing systems, quite distinct from the water lines for fresh water. This should be in place soon, in order that the demand for fresh water is met better.
Nearly every city in India gets only about 25 per cent of its water needs met from river water sources; the rest is with borewells that gouge groundwater up, and deplete the lifeline of large tracts of lands in cities and their peripheries.
* You can see that the solutions are not complex, but the implementation of solutions are difficult because of the various pull-and-push factors that come out of lack of homogeneity and oneness of objective among all stakeholders.
* The Government, the Water Supply Board (Jal Sansthaans), Water Development Corporations (Jal Nigams), Building Societies and Apartment Associations, Village Development Boards and Panchayats, are all urban and rural local bodies which can take to many of these solutions for efficient water management — if only they were on the same wavelength on how to get the solution in place.
Surely there may be some such factors that have improved over the years in WSS?
Well, there have been improvements in the way Water Supply Boards have responded in the face of growing needs in both the urban and the rural sectors. The solutions still somehow remain confined to the domain of finding new sources of water. Such governments and local bodies must surely turn to demand-side engineering of water, in a way that they are able to reduce dramatically the need for fresh water.
The solution is obvious: treat all waste water and use it for non-potable purposes. Singapore’s Nuwater programme launched about 18-20 months ago is now looking at treating wastewater to a point where the island-state’s citizens can drink it!
The Prime Minister was on TV taking a sip of the ‘Nuwater’ which was fresh water emerging from grey and black water flowing off the city’s drainage!
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