Plumbing, Water and sanitation Industry expectations from the Union budget for 2023-24
According to the United Nations’ most recent population projections, India will replace China as the world’s most populous country in 2023 and will retain that title until 2100.
According to the 2030 Water Resources Group, if we continue to consume water at the current rate, India will only have half the water it requires by 2030—a ten-year flashpoint.
Only 4% of the limited freshwater resources exist. Freshwater sources are under heavy stress. Water demand continues to outstrip supply, and this is predicted to increase by 40% by 2030. Individuals all over the world are dealing with a major challenge: the accessibility of fresh water resources.
Water is far too valuable to be used just once. Although India has 18% of the world’s population, it only has 4% of the world’s freshwater resources. It is already water-stressed, with only 1,544 cu m available per capita. Industrial water usage is rarely given the attention it deserves when it comes to water scarcity. While industrial water usage is one issue, sewage ejection, which can massively contaminate our rivers and eventually contaminate fresh water, is another. Major measures must be put in place as soon as possible to make water use more sustainable, efficient, and guided by a better understanding of how our water resources can be managed effectively to benefit future generations.
The government should advocate for funds to treat and reuse wastewater. We must spread awareness about the treatment of wastewater and start reducing the quantity of freshwater squandered. More campaigns should be launched by the government to raise awareness and educate domestic areas and people for the future.
With a water crisis looming over urban India, it’s critical to examine how Singapore turned its water story around. Despite being one of the world’s rainiest countries, Singapore suffers from water scarcity.
Singapore is entirely dependent on rain and imports fresh water from Malaysia. Due to a scarcity of water, it has been forced to create potable, municipal, and industrial water through recycling and renewal, resulting in “New Water.” The government has built an advanced sewage treatment system, which includes a network of tunnels and high-tech plants, to increase self-sufficiency. To generate New Water, the city’s sewage is being treated with increasingly sophisticated membrane technologies. Singapore now has ultra-clean drinking water that exceeds WHO standards.
We can save about 20% of our fresh water just by using a rainwater harvesting system.
The water shortages is an instinctual and man-made concern that millions of individuals in India and around the globe are attempting to deal with. While the government has done a significant amount in terms of budgetary allocation of funds to support the building of assets for both rural and urban sanitary conditions, there are still areas that require policy support to ensure that these funds are deployed where they have the greatest impact.
The rollout of process automation via innovative technology to replace manual ones, and thus the recovery of sanitary workers to better paying jobs, is a crucial point of focus, as is guaranteeing that tolerance and acceptance is used as the criterion for funding all sector initiatives.
In summary, the request from Budget 2023-2024 is for the government to aid in the facilitation of more partnerships between both the private sector and the government, where the Department of Sanitation and Drinking Water aims to establish public-private alliances to provide both solid and liquid waste management framework across all 6.4 lakh villages in India by 2024.
The influence of this initiative will extend to the communities’ health, education, and livelihoods, including women and children, primarily by providing them with sanitary and hygienic villages to live in and handle on their own.
Infrastructure creation and management, especially in the fields of Health, Sanitary conditions, Water, and Sanitation, are crucial to a society’s long-term survival, and if India is to sustain its potential growth over the coming decades, it must prioritise these areas in its budgetary allocations.
(The author is Mr. Gurmit Singh Arora, National President, Indian Plumbing Association and the views expressed in this article are his own)
