The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT-Kharagpur) will lead a European Union funded project to develop and evolve technologies that will reuse wastewater after treating it.
IIT Kharagpur is the lead Indian partner of the multi-institutional, multi-crore Saraswati 2.0 project for treatment and reuse of water, a statement issued by the institute on Wednesday said.
The funding of the project is being done by the European Union and the Government of India’s Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology.
The main of the project is to find the best available and affordable technologies for wastewater treatment and to provide accurate measures to the challenges face by the people in both rural and urban areas regarding water issues.
In total three water treatment plants will be set up at the IIT Kharagpur campus to treat wastewater and make them fit for reuse in irrigation.
“We will test different technologies at the three plants and evaluate their effectiveness,” said Prof Makarand Madhao Ghangrekar of the institute’s Aditya Choubey Center for Re-water Research.
The plants will be commissioned by January 2020.
Seven such plants will be also set up in the other partner Indian institute like IIT Madras, IIT Bhubaneswar, IIT Roorkee, NITIE Mumbai, MNIT Jaipur and TERI School of Advanced Studies.
IIT Kharagpur will manage the project along with its lead European partner University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.
They will execute the project in collaboration with several European institutes.
Saraswati 2.0 builds on the Saraswati project of 2012-17, which was also jointly funded by the European Commission and Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology.
This project will bring transfer of European technologies to India which could then be tested and customised according to Indian needs at an affordable cost in future.