Eighty Percent of India's Sewage Goes Untreated Into City Water Supplies

For all the many great things about India, adequate sanitation and water treatment is definitely not one of them. Let the following stat sink in: At a recent conference on the state of India's sewerage, the Economic Times reports that a full 80 percent of India's sewage goes untreated, flowing into waterways and seeping into the groundwater supply.

How much sewage are we talking about in total? 40,000 million liters generate each day, enough to irrigate 9 million hectares of land.

Some more dire sewage stats, getting at the scale of the problem: There's not a single city in the nation whose entire area is serviced with improved sewers. The best-performing cities, Pune, Chennai, Surat and Gurgaon, just hit the 70% mark. In total, Delhi and Mumbai account for 40% of the sewage infrastructure in the entire country.

Here's the stat that starts to bring the human impact of all this into focus: Half of India's growing urban population relies on groundwater (via wells or taps) for all of its water needs -- with nitrate in nearly all that water higher than healthy levels.

Further painting this picture is a report by the Indian Council of Medical Research, released last October, focusing on the health impacts of pollution in the River Ganges.

That report showed the vast amounts of both human and industrial pollutants flowing untreated into India's holiest river is causing record high levels of cancer among the population living along the river's banks -- the rate of gall bladder cancer in the region are the second highest in the world, with rates of prostate cancer being the highest in all of India.

Here's a graphic view of the problem, this time in another of India's holy rivers, the River Yamuna:

Making it all worse still is that India's groundwater supply itself is being overdrawn due to rising population levels, inefficient use of water in agriculture. Combining this decline in availability with rising pollution means that by 2050 per capita water availability is expected to drop by 44%.

That is, not accounting for the impact of climate change on seasonal water availability due to potential changes in the monsoon and seasonal runoff from melting glaciers.

As for solving the problem… well, that's the 200 crore rupees question. Awareness is there, with plenty of NGOs, like the World Toilet Organization, focusing on the problem. The technology is there, in both high-tech and low-tech varieties. But is the political will there? There are rumblings of coming changes, but it's a vast problem already, and one that's only growing.