Major Achievements

DBT is contributing to national efforts to clean up Indian rivers by supporting a major effort along with the Netherlands to implement novel technologies for cleaning up of the Barapullah canal and then finally initiate efforts to keep the Yamuna clean. The collaborative effort will support high quality research and development programmes aiming at ‘new’ wastewater management to ensure good quality, fresh water, free of risk-causing contaminants and promote productive, safe reuse of water, thereby enhancing human and environmental health conditions. In the next five years, a wastewater treatment plant to make the filthy water potable is scheduled to be set up besides removing heavy metals from the water for reuse. Most of the technology choices for cleaning the Barapullah drain would be biological in nature. It would demonstrate a novel holistic (waste-) water management approach, that will produce clean water that can be reused for various proposes (e.g. industry, agriculture, construction etc.), while simultaneously recovering nutrients and energy from the urban wastewater, thus converting drain into profitable mines. Special attention will be paid to removing pathogen and conventional and emerging pollutants (which are only partly retained in the existing WWTPs). Cleaning Barapullah, the second largest drain in Delhi would contribute to cleaning of rivers, perhaps the most important and noblest of our missions. The project will develop an innovative pilot scale plant, suitable to Indian conditions in a location specific manner. Immediate goals of the project are to set up toilets run by primary treated water from the drain and an on-site bio-compost unit.