By Dr. Hari Haran Chandra

There is a clear need in our cities for understanding why we use fresh water only once when technology has transformed to turn used water into pure drinking water.

More than 5000 delegates from 60 countries gathered for the inaugural Singapore International Water Week conference and the World Cities Summit. Many were there to learn about the marketing and technology behind NEWater, Singapore’s recycled water scheme since 2002. The year was 2008.

Recalled Prof. Kishore Mahbubani, the then dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, “The NEWater campaign was very, very carefully done. The Government knew there would be a lot of psychological resistance.” The conference was a demonstration that you can gradually, over time, change people’s comfort levels.

Back in 2002, a Sydney political leader, Peter Debnam, realized that ‘Recycled water is a PR disaster’. How can governments convince voters they want to drink water made from urine? Peter downed cup after cup of the clean treated stuff for the cameras but the Premier declared ‘the people of New South Wales are “not ready” for water made from effluent’.

Singapore had an odd challenge. Recycled water is the city’s fourth water source. It is made by drawing moisture from the nation’s sewage and forcing it through filters and superfine membranes at very high pressures to remove impurities such as the cryptosporidium bacteria. The final water, which is also disinfected with ultraviolet light, is so clean the manufacturers add impurities so it tastes “normal”. But simply telling people that NEWater – as the recycled water was named – was safe…was never going to be enough. The Government needed to pitch the message. With this Singapore had brought down fresh water need to as little as 20 percent. It continues to protect 90 percent of Singapore’s equatorial forest lands knowing that the water they regenerate is a vital lifeline for the city-state.

The name for the water was critical back then in 2002. NEWater was a stroke of genius. Words such as sewage or wastewater were effectively ‘banned’. A cute mascot – a smiley blue raindrop called Water Wally – promoted NEWater to school children and featured on a government TV show all about water. Celebrities were spotted drinking NEWater while the clean stuff even began turning up in music videos. Soon, squeamishness seemed old-fashioned and quaint. Said one of the officials who were part of the campaign back then, “The idea of soft-selling was a very important part of the program. It was all very deliberate to reach out to the youngest people and make people listen to what we have to say.” They chose the phrase ‘used water’. The connotation was clear: used water is not made from waste.

The Government handed out thousands of brightly decorated bottles of free, recycled water and launched a slick visitors center to explain the process. Models, cute children and happy couples are the stars of the promotional videos and interactive games at the center.

The marketing reached an ecstatic peak on Singapore’s national day, August 9 of 2002. More than 70,000 people at a national parade each received a bottle of NEWater. They watched while the then prime minister held up his bottle. And they loved it. The prime minister said, ‘Let’s drink to the nation‘, and everyone held their bottles up and drank. It was a great photo op. “The first time you drink it, you have your qualms. But after you drink it, it is fine. Especially when you know the reality is that some of the other water we drink is probably dirtier than NEWater,” said one of the citizens on national TV.

Back home in India, it is easy to shrug, ‘Singaporean people tend to be more accepting of government policy and perhaps a little less questioning.’ It is all very well to envy the economic growth Singapore has had. It is also understandable if you are one to concede their success but settle down to saying, “They are small, and manageable at just 5 million people.” The lesson for us to learn from a Singapore—and the fact that they are small does not make the challenge of urban planning easier—is that they planned hard, and worked harder to achieve every milestone, always keeping an eye on the very long-term.

India’s administrators and political leaders are not unfamiliar with the need for a national water policy. The first such was tabled in 1987. It was revised in 2002, and then again in 2012. However, the objectives set down were somehow not quite informed of the ballooning crisis, though the writing on the wall has existed from about the time the first policy was enunciated. The objectives were obfuscated in generalities. The policy document set the goal to be ‘to take cognizance of the existing situation, to propose a framework for the creation of a system of laws and institutions and for a plan of action with a unified national perspective’. Reading the original document or the later editions shows little effort and determination to act with plans and outcomes. The new water policy 2022 is hoping to change that. Says a Senior Official at the Jal Shakti ministry, “I am glad that you are resonating with the directions that the ministry is establishing. We agree that there is a great deal to be done.” [See Part 3 of this series] He continues, “We are waking up to the long term need too, of working on these aspects of the headwaters, the water catchments of the natural ecosystems at the source of our rivers and rain-fed reservoirs that feed our cities.” The government, naturally, will be cautious about taking to these cutting-edge solutions that may bring public flak, even if for unfounded reasons. Administrators themselves need convincing on such possibilities of NEWater.

Watch what Singapore did with water management. They realized, as Indian business, industry, and people should, that any economy is first a water economy. They worked assiduously on recycling wastewater, harvesting rainwater, desalination, and on avoiding flooding in case of heavy downpours.

Asks Vikas Brahmavar, CEO of Transwaters, “What happens to the ‘dirty’ water after you are done with using it for washing your bodies, clothes, kitchenware, cars, and floors? You need less than 20 percent for drinking and cooking. Why would we use good clean water just once and wrestle with sourcing water from tankers and from borewells that are dying or drying up by the day?”

For 75 years post-independence, as city dwellers, we got away with governments supplying fresh water from pristine areas at long distances. Today, with river water supply down to 50 percent of the daily need of almost every city, ‘we need disruptive thinking’ says another water scientist from the IISc, Bangalore. The per head statistic in Bangalore of Kaveri water supply is about 75-80 liters with a lot lost (50 crore liters a day at Rs. 100 for every thousand liters of leakages— every day). All of them plan for about 130 liters to a head in their cities but lose about 40 percent to leaks and thefts or what is called euphemistically ‘non-revenue’ water. With local solutions that water users adopt, the need for such centralized solutions will diminish.

We have relied for a century on the ‘modern technology’ of using piped supply for getting fresh water for consumption. This has been around from Roman times and makes no sense at all in a future where we have no more long-distance water sources. Every city has stretched its limits on sources of water from rivers, or lakes last built and nurtured a century ago. Those urban planners of the past who rooted for supply-side solutions are at a complete loss and find themselves professionally irrelevant. They need to reinvent their roles.

Solutions to make our buildings net-zero on water with all fresh water, once used, being treated for drinking again, is where the new engineering challenge of the 2020s lies. Solutions exist as I can personally testify given the numbers of such in-building scale projects that I have directed to reduce 80-85 percent of fresh water import.

Things are set to change. If Singapore showed the way, way back in 2002, China in the last decade has moved about 60 cities quietly without fanfare into treating their waste water into high-grade, potable drinking water. Reclaimed water use in Beijing and Jiangsu are presented as two representative examples. China’s reclaimed water experience can provide some guidance for other countries facing similar water resource situations. Reclaimed water is specified to refer to: (i) the water through wastewater treatment plants whose water quality satisfies the ‘Water Quality Standard for Reclaimed Water’ at the source of the domestic wastewater; (ii) the water through secondary treatment in wastewater treatment plants and further treatment of water reclamation plants (different treatment technologies depending on different use objectives), whose water quality satisfies ‘Water Quality Standard for Reclaimed Water’; and (iii) the water which is diverted into water-using enterprises from wastewater treatment plants through special water supply pipelines, and further treated by those water-using enterprises.

“No more than two liters to a person is used for drinking, with another 5 liters per person for cooking at a generous estimate. So much fresh water for all the rest of the use that can very well be served with NEWater options, even if you don’t want to drink it,” says a City Water Planner in Chennai. “This is like using your new BMW to take chickens from a farm to the marketplace!”

Bottled water that we pay up to Rs 20, has as source groundwater in farm zones where the chemical contamination is high, yet because it is packaged well, we accept it as water that is ‘safe’ to drink. Water that is supplied from tankers again comes from borewells in areas of the city’s periphery suffer the same risk of contamination, and we drink it sometimes even with just the elementary water treatment that a domestic RO or UV filter offers.

The water treatment business has changed dramatically thanks to advancement in human genomics and its impact on environment engineering. Water treatment systems now understand the structure and function of microbes in biological treatment systems. These are sequentially managed systems that essentially modify the operating conditions in a way that they infuse more powerful bacteria to cleanse water of organic content. These are technologies that are low on energy use. Apartments and other buildings can have these compact decentralized Health Grade Water systems with no more than the space of two parking lots. The conventional engineer of the past argued for long – and he was right – that the scale of the economy offers better costs if centralized. That has changed over the last five years, both in terms of thinking and in the delivery of such treatment options.

What is interesting is that such treatment doesn’t need complex central water treatment systems. This can very well be achieved in any apartment block of 150 homes, or an office or mall discharging about two lakh liters a day.

The cost of installing these waste water to health grade drinking water systems is recovered in under three years if you assume cost of fresh water purchased by tankers to be about Rs. 120 per kilo liter. “About a half-million units of power is saved every year at 300 kiloliters a day of water use even if we assumed 5 units of source power for thermal power supplied to a building. The Carbon and GHG emissions saved are enormous,” says Pallavi Singh, a research associate at the Bangalore-based AltTech Foundation.“This major disruption in costs of such technology has been possible thanks to deep-end research in human genomes. The commercialising of such products has already succeeded,” says Vikas Brahmavar whose company is transforming the application of used water for hygiene water applications. “Many companies and apartments are taking to such Health Grade Water treatment systems but have not brought themselves to drink it — they have used them for chiller plants for centrally air-conditioned buildings.” This reluctance to drink the water is a challenge of behavioural acceptance and not of the water-grade itself.

Aversion to drinking this water whose source is your own apartment’s waste water should not be such a major behavioral hurdle. Says a young researcher, Shreya Nath, from a Bangalore based environment centre, “When people were asked if they would use such NEWater for bathing, washing, and other daily needs, the answer was an instant no. But when they were asked if they would drink it if this was done centrally, directed to a freshwater lake, and then supplied, the response was a yes!” We are only a step away from the shift to drinking the water as this visual testimony from one set of residents in Bangalore shows.

There are apartments in Bangalore who have swung into action. Some pioneering builders have shown the way ten years ago. It’s only a matter of a couple more years before more such solutions hit the marketplace with used water becoming drinking water with the loop closed right at the point of use. Produce-consume as Alvin Toffler said ‘prosume’ is now going to be the norm. The burdensome legacy of the past, of water from rivers at a long distance will reduce dramatically as our need for water from pristine sources falls by 90 percent.

If there’s a certainty in this scenario playing out over the next half-decade it is because it doesn’t need the government to step. The compelling logic of price and the proven quality of water will alone be enough to make our cities sustainable water if all stakeholders and users simply helped in educating the end water user to see good sense in this financially viable approach that will sustain the future of our cities.

India can resolve the water crisis that is today alarming—if the New Water Policy realizes its powerful vision, widens its canvas to strengthen the river and reservoir catchments, and brings behaviour change in having water-users realise that used-water is the new oil.

About the Author

Dr. Hari Haran Chandra is a Trustee at INHAF, Prem Jain Memorial Trust, AltTech Foundation; and a Senior Fellow at the Indian Green Building Council.

WOW AF is a multi-city citizen-led initiative now in action in four Indian cities of Bengaluru, Chennai, Trichy, and Hyderabad; and moving soon to four more cities in the country, and is led by water experts and citizen leaders who seek to bring water efficiency with water-users adopting solutions to meet a Mission Target of Saving 3000 Crore Liters in these cities.

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