Agricultural scientists devise way of getting clean water, money out of sewage

The Indian Agricultural Research Institute has successfully installed a purification system for their homes in Pusa that can clean 2.2 million litres of domestic sewage daily using almost zero thermal power.

Updated on: Jun 15, 2014, 01:17:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A colony of agricultural scientists in central Delhi has shown that it is viable to decontaminate water while mimicking nature, and that the mechanism can be highly gainful. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute has successfully installed a purification system for their homes in Pusa that can clean 2.2 million litres of domestic sewage daily using almost zero thermal power.

The water, devoid of harmful chemicals, can be used for gardening or irrigation. The treated water can help generate good produce from 120 hectares of farmland – about 100 football fields – assuring sustained income.

IARI director Dr HS Gupta said the produce has been found to be fit for human consumption. “All harmful chemicals in the sewage are absorbed by the wetland plants that are part of the purification system,” he added.

The system, costing Rs 1.2 crore, is based on nature’s ways. The dirty water is collected and flown through an array of wetland plants with capacity to absorb chemicals such as lead and mercury up to 1,000 parts per million (ppm).

Apart from assured agricultural income, the wetland plants can be harvested for a revenue of `18 lakh annually.

The biomass – organic matter derived from the plants – can be used to develop 9,000 sq m of chipboard (a kind of building material), or can be sold in open market at Rs 2,000 per tonne. About 36 lakh tonnes of biomass is produced in the facility annually, said project director Ravinder Kaur.

While the process of cleaning is slow and labour intensive, the system consumes only 1% of the power required to run a conventional sewage treatment plant.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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