How we got Dilliwalas to drink sewage water

Having grown up in Delhi with its acute water woes, it was a no brainer that when I set up my not-for-profit trust SANA – Social Awareness, Newer Alternatives, in 2011, I decided to concentrate on the water and sanitation space. My vision was simple - I was convinced that technology could be an enabler in providing sustainable and green solutions. My first initiative was a solar-powered compact water purifying station that SANA set up at the RPVV School in Surajmal, East Delhi.

The technology we used had a drawback - for every 5,000 litres of water purified daily, there were 2,000 litres of waste water. It was then that I had a Eureka moment - what if we set up an integrated solar powered compact water purifying station cum bio toilets and the waste water could be used to flush the toilets? It was serendipity! Incidentally, Google came up with their Global Impact Challenge, where NGOs with innovative use of technology would compete for a half a million dollar US grant. SANA entered the challenge with our integrated model, which we designed for use in rural India. The rest, as they say, is history. SANA won the Google Impact Challenge and received a grant of Rs three crore.

We used this money to scale up our vision and implement it in the villages of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Here we supported the technology with capacity building and motivational workshops. The initiative targeted social intervention among Dalit women and children as a social engineering mechanism because the upper castes would have to come to the Dalit area to collect water. Today we are rolling out this model in twenty villages and the district administration has joined us as a partner. Oracle, an IT giant, has also come forward to support us to implement this model in all girls' schools and three of them have been picked from the most backward tribal region in Vizag district.

By now, we had identified a technology that could convert sewage waste into safe, potable drinking water. I approached the Delhi Jal Board (DJP) with a plan to set up a pilot project that connected solar-powered sewage waste to a drinking water plant on the banks of Yamuna. Unfortunately, there were too many legal hurdles since the Yamuna flows through a number of states, and the use of its water by third parties is restricted by contracts. It was then that we decided to set up the pilot project Sujala Dhara-Toilet to Tap-Transforming Lives Through Technology at the DJB Keshopur Sewage Treatment plant.

Water is seen as a fundamental right by the United Nations. But the truth is that, in India, many of us have no access to clean and safe drinking water. Almost every household either uses RO filtration in their kitchen or buys bottled water, a lot of which is of dubious purity.

I am convinced that the way forward is to have an out-of-the-box solution and while conservation through rain water harvesting is important; as is a multi-pronged strategy for water security, we need to look at recycled water as a major solution. Singapore is cited by all as an example of how a city state has used sewage waste and converted it to pure drinking water, which today constitutes 30 per cent of its total drinking water output.

For an NGO, our goal is to be an evangelist for the cause of promoting recycled water. And we realise that the greatest challenge will be to battle mindsets and prejudices against the drinking of water sourced from sewage - the Yuck Factor. I know that in Australia there was a campaign to ban such water. But today Perth gets 20 per cent of its drinking water from sewage waste and this has a 76 per cent approval from the citizens. This change was made possible by a concerted media campaign, promoting recycled drinking water.

Our Sujala Dhara has gone through rigorous lab testing and has been found to be safe and fit for human consumption.

I believe that, in the years to come, what Delhi needs will be hundreds or even thousands of neighbourhood Sujala Dhara Plants like the one inaugurated on July 9 by Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, and state water minister Kapil Mishra. SANA and DJB’s Sujala Dhara - the Toilet to Tap - is a solution which can truly transform lives of Dilliwalas.

Small is indeed beautiful!