What are the challenges of wastewater treatment in urban India?

For long, poor sanitation has been equated with negative health outcomes. When antibiotics had not been invented (19th century), poor sanitation and poor quality of drinking water caused maximum morbidity and mortality.

Poor sanitation and poor water quality remains a major challenge in the 21st century. We now have large megacities with a never-ending demand for clean water that is often sourced hundreds of kilometres away, and an equally large discharge of used water, often untreated, that is turning our rivers into open sewers.

Health risks from poor water and sanitation, its impacts on the less privileged, women and migrants, remains a major concern. In addition, today, we also face the twin challenges of water stress and climate change induced intensification of the water cycle that is causing both water stress and flooding in our cities; and the need to harvest nutrients from the large mass of human waste that is generated.

On top of this, we have large dense informal settlements that are cities within a city, resulting from unplanned urbanisation in most cities of the Global South.

Urban water and sanitation, stormwater management are now closely linked with the rights and justice concerns. Every year, the concentration of population in Indian cities increases. According to the Central Pollution Control Board, wastewater generation in urban centres is more than 70,000 million litres per day.

With increasing populations, are Indian cities equipped to deal with the concurrent waste? Let’s find out.