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Binding with soil, water and energy
Chandrashekar Hariharan
The turnaround from a chartered accountant to an alternative technology expert could not 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.”
Ranjani Govind caught up with Chandrashekar Hariharan for a detailed chat.
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.
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. 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.
So, the critical question for any farmer is…
How do I secure enough water for the second crop with the first rainfed crop barely enough to meet the farmer’s own family’s needs? All waiters and dishwashers in small hotels swarming the cities are boys who have left their villages because there is not enough land to support the entire family. How do we create more opportunities in such hinterlands by giving them the chance to grow the second crop, which will either feed them through the year, or leave an income surplus?
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.
* 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.
* 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.
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