How Water Pollution in India Kills Millions - BORGENThe Consequences of India’s Poor Water QualityAround 70% of wastewater goes untreated and ...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
The Consequences of India’s Poor Water Quality
Around 70% of wastewater goes untreated and each day, more than 40 million liters of wastewater flows directly into India’s lakes, rivers and ocean. Eventually, contaminated water also enters the groundwater. Because of this, proper waste management and sewage pollution cannot occur, upsetting the irrigation system. The crops are not able to grow because of the infectious bacteria and disease in the water. Because of the poor infrastructure and absence of sewage control, 38 million Indians suffer from waterborne diseases like typhoid, cholera and hepatitis every year. Over the last decade, the frequency of these illnesses remained at the same level.
Worldwide, waterborne diseases cause more deaths than AIDS, tuberculosis and measles combined in children under 5-years-old. Water pollution in India not only harms people’s health and food security, but it also contributes to the decrease in India’s GDP and economic stagnation. Not only does GDP growth reduce by one-third when the pollution in the country’s waterbodies exceeds a certain limit, but agricultural revenues lower by 9% in the districts that are close to industrial territories. The degradation of the environment, including water pollution in India, leads to a loss of $80 billion annually. Meanwhile, estimates determine that the health costs to treat waterborne diseases are almost $9 billion per year.
India’s Action Steps to Eradicate Water Pollution
India is taking several steps to rebalance the quality of its water source, from flocculation and reuse of industrial water to the contributions that local Indian startups are making. In Chennai, a city in Eastern India, industrial water reuse rose from 36,000 to 80,000 cubic meters in 3 years, from 2016 to 2019. VA Tech Wabag, a water company quartered in Chennai, also built numerous water reuse plants all across India. As of 2020, VA Tech Wabag contributed immensely to the production of more than 18 million cubic meters of clean water every day, which has positively impacted almost 100 million people globally.
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https://www.borgenmagazine.com/water-pollution-in-india/Taxonomy
- Water Pollution
- Pollution
- Water Stewardship
- Pollution