Thursday 28 Mar 2024

Recycle and reuse

Goa is wasting treated sewage rnwater and this is criminal

| MARCH 23, 2017, 07:02 PM IST


As the world commemorates World Water Day with its focus this year on wastewater, Goa can boast of a painful statistic. Not only is only 13% of Goa’s urban population connected through a sewerage system with three functioning sewerage plants in the state, worse still, the water that is treated isn’t recycled or reused for gardening, washing animals and vehicles but is instead just dumped into creeks and rivers for it to flow into the Arabian Sea.
For a state that boasts of an educated population, this is unforgivable. The root of the problem lies in society’s willingness to accept the treated sewage water as one that can recycled and reused for pretty much everything.
Not just Sewerage Corporation officials, but even Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar during previous stints had vowed to publicly drink a glass of such water if only to prove a point that sewerage systems in his government are running well and in a bid to insist that such water is completely safe for drinking. However, if recent instances are anything to go by, the message has not trickled down to the general population.
If anything, such initiatives will help bring social acceptability to sewerage projects and recycled water something badly needed especially when only a paltry 13% of the state’s urban population is connected to a network.
Recent opposition to sewerage plants, most particularly the Porvorim sewerage plant is what comes to mind. Residents, in the belief that sewerage plants are often mismanaged and an undoubted nuisance in the neighbourhood, opposed a plant planned for Porvorim and laughed at the idea that the recycled water could be used to wash buses of an adjacent Kadamba Transport Corporation depot. That the government agreed to shift the plant has only served to reinforce the idea that such treated water is indeed unfit for anything but to be dumped in the rivers and seas. In Panaji, the sewage plant releases its water in the Santa Inez creek which they say helps in flushing of the creek.
As a first step, this water could instead be offered to the Corporation of the City of Panaji for the watering of the various public gardens and other vegetation along footpaths and gardens.
Similar plans should be drawn up for other sewerage treatment plants to reuse the precious fresh water either through memoranda of understanding with hotels and establishments for their lawn and gardens or even for industrial use.
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