Series: Apartment Water Solutions

On November 1st, KSPCB released a guide on Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs). In this exclusive interview with Citizen Matters, KSPCB Chairman A S Sadashivaiah talks about how the guide will help, and clears the air on many issues that resident associations have been raising on STP maintenance. Most apartment complexes today have their own Sewage Treatment Plant(STP). According to KSPCB rules, any large apartment (more than 5,000 sq m in the outskirts or more than 20000 sq m in core areas) need to have STPs. The new guide has illustrated explanation about the working and engineering features of STP, and…

In the last few months, many apartments in the city were pulled up for not operating their Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) according to standards. Apartment associations had complained that the standards set for STPs were too stringent and that officials did not follow clear guidelines during inspection. Click here to download The STP Guide: Design, Operation and Maintenance A guidebook released by the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) on November 1st addresses these issues. The book was authored by Dr Ananth S Kodavasal, environment expert and Founder of Ecotech Engineering Consultancy. Dr Kodavasal, in the book, has recommended that…

At our apartment complex, 'Mana Sarovar' in Doddanekkundi, we have installed water meters for all individual 32 flats and provided monthly maintenance as per individual water usage.  All the meters have been installed on the terrace. ManaSarovar__Apartment_Water_Meters Earlier we used to buy 3-4 tankers per day with limited supply of water. Water was available for 1.5 hours in the morning, one hour in the afternoon and 1.5 hours at night for almost a year.  But now we have 24 hour water supply but buy only 2 tankers per day. I did some analysis of water usage in my apartment complex. One can see…

Rainbow Drive Layout, Bhoomi Network for Sustainable Living and Biome Environmental Solutions had together organised a talk by Dr Chandrashekar from Vision Earthcare on May 30th 2010 at the Rainbow Drive Club House on Sarjapur Road. Dr Chandrashekar articulated the limitations of existing STPs and how an ecological method which is Soil Biotechnology (SBT) based STPs, researched for over two decades at IIT-Bombay, provides clean river quality water at a lower cost. Vision Earthcare, incubated in IIT Bombay, has licensed this method for deployment globally. Attendees of the talk included ex-panchayat leaders, active citizens from several layouts, chemical and environment…

At Casa Ansal apartments on Bannerghata Road, JP Nagar, we got samples of the following drinking water sources tested from a reputed water testing laboratory. Cauvery water as received from BWSSB Water from the open well near A- Block Water from the open well near D- Block Water from borewell near B- block This is what we inferred from the test results: None of the samples meet the Indian standard specifications for drinking water. The Cauvery water sample is the worst of the lot. It contains the highest MPN (Most probable number of Bacteria count) The water from the other…

"The next world war will be over water" - Ismail Serageldin, former Vice President of the World Bank. As with any problem, the proper way to manage water is to adopt a holistic approach along the lines of reduce, reuse and recycle and ensure active participation by both individual residents as well as the Apartment Owners Associations. The Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO) guidelines state that the average water consumption per person, in megacities is 150 liters per day (lpd). For an average household of 4 persons, that works out to 600 lpd. Try to figure out…

In the earlier parts of this series we have seen as to how in a layout context, the Resident Welfare Association (RWA) is the body that is aware of the issues that the residents face, can engage with the residents to identify appropriate solutions, can build consensus on issues/resolutions and enable the implementation of measures to ensure issue resolution. We have also discussed the relevance of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in the layout context, and dealt with FAQ’s on the same. In this article we will see how the RWA can play the role of a 'Resource Manager' for water, assuming…

The first two parts of this series dealt with arriving at a broad layout-level strategy for rainwater harvesting (RWH) and how to engage the residents and decision-making bodies of the layout to move the strategy forward. When engaging with residents, one will inevitably face many questions about why people should consider rainwater harvesting (RWH), how the systems are constructed and how they work. The following discussion concentrates on how to address these FAQs, first focusing on general RWH questions and then on more technical questions related to RWH for direct storage and groundwater recharge. Rainwater Clubrainwaterclub [at] gmail [dot] com1022,…

In Part 1 of this series, we touched on the crucial first steps to implementing rainwater harvesting (RWH) in a layout - asking yourself why the layout should implement RWH, what implementation strategies make sense in your layout, and consulting with someone with RWH technical capacity to assist with conception, design and implementation. This part focuses on the human dimension of implementing RWH at a collective level. As we saw in Part 1, the two RWH implementation strategies for a layout are household collection for domestic use, and collection from households and common areas for groundwater recharge. To implement either…

Step 2 – What should be the RWH strategy for your layout Another factor to consider when determining the best RWH interventions for your context is your layout’s land use pattern. In a typical urban residential layout, land use is usually as follows: approximately 60% is rooftops, 20% is roads and the rest is open-areas like parks, playgrounds, footpaths, transformer yards or drains. This means that the largest amount of rain is falling on rooftops. Rooftops are also clean and so rainwater running off of them is clean. It is prudent to try and capture this at the household level…