Scottish-IISc researchers develop wastewater treatment, recycling system

Bengaluru, Nov 29 : A team of interdisciplinary researchers from Scotland in collaboration with Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed an efficient decentralised wastewater treatment and recycling system at Berambadi primary school situated in a remote village in Karnataka’s Chamarajnagar district.
About 200km southwest of Bengaluru is Berambadi, a village nestled between mountains, swathes of agricultural fields, the Hirikere lake, and the Bandipur National Park.
This verdant countryside with tidy roads that borders Karnataka’s neighbours Kerala and Tamil Nadu is spellbinding. However, Berambadi, located in the rain shadow side of the Western Ghats, has been hit by drought several times in the last few years.
A study, published in the Journal of Water Process Engineering and carried out in collaboration with researchers in Scotland, shows how the system has, over the past year, enabled the reuse of wastewater and reduced dependence on freshwater resources, IISc said in a statement.
The project, funded by the Scotland government, is a collaboration between IISc, the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru, the James Hutton Institute, Scotland, and the University of Glasgow.
“We have demonstrated for the first time that decentralised wastewater treatment systems can be economically put into practice in a rural setting,” the Centre for Sustainable Technologies, IISc, Assistant Professor and a senior author of the paper Lakshminarayana Rao said, adding that decentralised wastewater treatment system is the way to go.