by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, News, Politics
Darbhanga/Patna : An innovative cost-effective drinking water project in Bihar promises to lower the price of one-litre bottle to 50 paise — cheapest in the world.
The project — Sulabh Jal — was launched on Saturday in Darbhanga by Sulabh International. It will convert contaminated pond water into safe drinking water.
“Sulabh International, an organisation that introduced the concept of ‘Sulabh Shauchalya’ in the country decades ago from Bihar, today (Saturday) laid the foundation stone for an innovative project which will provide cheapest drinking water in the world costing only 50 Paisa per litre,” said a statement from the social service organisation.
“Sulabh Jal will be made available through various stages of purification. It can offer safe drinking water from any water body such as a river or a pond,” it said.
Sulabh International founder Bindeshwar Pathak laid the foundation for the project at Haribol Pond on Darbhanga Nagar Nigam premises.
“The project work will start soon. By December it will be functional,” Pathak said.
Installation of the project would cost around Rs 20 lakh and it would have a capacity to produce 8,000 litres of potable water per day at a nominal cost.
“Local people and NGOs are going to maintain it. It is a self-sustainable project with active participation of the community. It will also generate employment,” he said.
The pilot project in three districts of North 24 Parganas, Murshidabad and Nadia in West Bengal had been jointly established three years ago by Sulabh and a French organisation and the trial run proved successful.
“This is first time in the world that we have succeeded in producing pure drinking water at a very nominal cost using this new technology and villagers would directly benefit from it,” said Pathak.
Groundwater in many parts of Bihar bordering Nepal has been severely affected by arsenic and other chemical contamination.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday said the government has made a “sacred commitment” of covering 90 per cent of Indian rural households with piped water supply by 2022, when the country completes 75 years of Independence.
Inaugurating India Water Week-2017 here, the President said access to water was a byword for human dignity and that providing safe drinking water to people living in 600,000 villages and urban areas was not just a project proposal for the government.
“It is a sacred commitment. The government has prepared a strategic plan for ensuring drinking water supply in all rural areas by 2022. By that year, the goal is to cover 90 per cent of rural households with piped water supply. We cannot fail,” he said.
He said while water was fundamental to the economy and to ecology — and to human equity, the issue of scarcity of water was becoming still more critical in view of climate change and related environmental concerns.
“Better and more efficient use of water is a challenge for Indian agriculture and industry alike. It requires us to set new benchmarks in both our villages and in the cities we build.”
He said currently, 80 per cent of water in India was used by agriculture and only 15 per cent by industry.
But the ratio, he asserted, is expected to change in the coming years as the demand for water would also rise.
“Efficiency of water use and reuse, therefore, has to be built into the blueprint of industrial projects. Business and industry need to be a part of the solution.”
He observed that 40 billion litres of waste water was produced every day in urban India which made it vital to adopt a technology to reduce the toxic content of the waste water and to deploy it for irrigation purposes.
He called for water management approach to be localised so that it empowered villages and neighbourhood communities and built their capacity to manage, allocate and value their water resources.
“Any 21st century water policy must factor in the concept of the value of water. It must encourage all stakeholders, including communities, to expand their minds — and to graduate from allocating a quantum of water to allocating a quantum of benefits.”
—IANS
