If Bengaluru stops saying ‘yuck’ to treated wastewater, it will never get thirsty again: experts

BENGALURU: In 2016, the Center for Ecological Sciences (CES) of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, came up with a plan for the city to maintain a water surplus.

The CES technical report found that an average of 20.05 TMC of water is required annually for domestic use, of which approximately 80% (16.04 TMC) can potentially be covered by sewage treatment. Combined with the annual rainfall yield of 14.80 TMC, Bengaluru could easily meet its water needs, according to the report.

Fast forward to 2023, when some apartment owners in Emmanuel Heights in Hosa Road, Sarjapur, proposed installing a sewage treatment plant in October. Little did they know that it would take almost six months to convince the others.

“They all only agreed after the company that set up the sewage treatment equipment included in the agreement that they would buy all the treated water. Many people were adamant that not a drop of the treated water should be used in the complex Forget drinking, they didn’t even want the treated water to water the plants because they have the tulsi factory,” said Gopidas, a software engineer at Amazon who lives in Immanuel Heights.

S Vishwanath, Bengaluru’s water conservation expert and director of Biome Environmental Solutions, has long advocated the use of treated wastewater for drinking. He believes that the problem is now psychological in nature, as science has already shown that consuming treated wastewater is completely safe.

“People find it hard to wrap their heads around drinking what they consider sewage. Everything that is said against it is largely due to ignorance. Science has advanced enough that we can drink treated sewage without experiencing any health problems. cause,” Vishwanath said. PTI.

Recently, Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha and Rainmatter Foundation, endorsed Boson White Water, a Bengaluru-based company that converts wastewater into drinking water, on X (formerly Twitter). While some agreed with him, many were disgusted by the idea of drinking water that was once sewage.

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People started claiming, without scientific evidence, that treated water contains heavy metals or hormones, making it unfit for consumption. Concerns also stemmed from the perception that sewage treatment plants are poorly managed.

Vikas Brahmavar, one of the founders of Boson White Water, said they were flooded with calls after their promotional video shared by Kamath went viral.

“In one day we received more than 300 calls. We have been doing this for two years now and at most we get a dozen calls every day,” Brahmavar told PTI.

However, most calls were attempts to reiterate that wastewater, treated or not, is smelly and dirty. “We have come a long way in these two years. But we still have to convince people to drink wastewater. It will take some time to break that psychological barrier. What people don’t understand is that from the moment we become dependent have turned to tankers for water supply, we have gone beyond the ‘water is dirty’ curve. Who knows where they get that water from,” said Brahmavar.

Vishwanath pointed out that people are not aware that they are already indirectly consuming treated wastewater. He was referring to Lakshmi Sagara Lake in Kolar, the first of 82 lakes in Kolar and Chikkaballapur districts to be filled with treated effluent from a sewage treatment plant (STP) as part of the Koramangala-Challaghatta (KC) Valley project. The government plans to fill 134 lakes at a cost of Rs 1,342 crore. “The project is one of the first in India to formally use secondary treated wastewater in such large quantities to fill the tanks and river ecosystem and provide water for agricultural use,” said Viswanath.

Biome Environmental Trust, Vishwanath’s organization, conducted a survey among locals, mainly farmers, in June 2021 to assess the impact of the project. They found that lakes and tanks filled with treated water increased well yields.

“For example, in Lakshmi Sagara, when the lake was filled with treated sewage for three months, the water level rose in open wells and in six months the water level rose in the borewells. Now the farmers here are cultivating all year round,” said he.

(With inputs from PTI)

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