Tap and Switch

Some of the readers may have come across one or more of the words ‘water treatment plant’ (WTP), ‘sewage treatment plant’ (STP) and ‘effluent treatment plant’ (ETP). A brief description of these three is given below. All these processes deal with treatment of water so that the levels of certain substances in it are reduced to acceptable levels based on what the water will be used for after treatment. While water treatment mainly deals with processing the water so that it becomes fit for specific uses, both sewage treatment and effluent treatment are done on used water or ‘wastewater’ to remove the contaminants added to it due to use so that it is fit for being released into other water bodies. Directly releasing untreated wastewater into natural water bodies leads to situations such as  rivers foaming excessively and lakes catching fire . Water treatment plant Water treatment plants are used for treatment of ‘raw’ water before supplying it further for use by people. Water from...

Part 1  covered the design aspects of a water supply system. In this part, we take a look at losses and other issues with water supply systems. Population growth is a fact, and so too is the increasing requirement of water as a result. Local resources have depleted or are no longer sufficient, and water is being increasingly drawn from more and more distant resources. Take the Narmada for example – it is now either the primary source or at least a major source of water for Bhopal, Indore,  Vadodara and Ahmedabad – four of the top 20 Indian cities in terms of population (2011 census), in addition to a number of other cities and towns (Jabalpur and  Ujjain are marked on the map). High expenditure is involved in extracting water from the Narmada in all these cities due to either topography or distance. Both Bhopal and Indore are located at a straight-line distance of around 60 km from the water extraction locations on the Narmada, with significant and sharp increase in ...