Planning for an integrated municipal wastewater management system: a case study of Indore city

Abstract

There are various ways of promoting sanitation in urban areas depending upon the physical, social and economic characteristics of the place. An efficient system of municipal wastewater management, i.e. Sewerage management, is an important tool for achieving the goal of sanitation for which it must not be ignored. Growing urban population of developing regions has put immense pressure on the ULBs upon provisions of infrastructural services for fulling the needs of all the people. Also, it is often observed that the sewerage management system is a less focused sector as compared to other sectors such as water supply in most of the Indian cities as revealed in various statistics. Indian cities have seen a tremendous growth in terms of both area and population in the past few decades. Still, cities have been using the conventional approaches of treating and managing sewage generated from those cities. This conventional approach generally consists of a centralized system for treatment of sewage which is a cost extensive and less environment friendly process. This dissertation has been conducted to analyze when and why the conventional systems of wastewater treatment fail to cater the needs of all the people and explore more reliable alternate approaches of dealing with sewerage system management taking the case of Indore city in Madhya Pradesh. Indore is the most populated city in central India and presently depends upon a centralized sewerage system that is performing poorly in the city. The environmental implications of the current sewerage system in Indore has resulted in loss of its primary natural drain i.e. Khan River which has suffered from extreme water pollution and is now a nallah. The end results of this study talk about the planning interventions and framework to execute an integrated system for sewerage management at various city scales of Indore that would be much more sustainable, environment friendly and cost effective.