IIT Kharagpur to lead Saraswati 2.0 project for treatment of water in India

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, has been selected to lead the Saraswati 2.0 project, which is funded by European Union (EU) and the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology for the rejuvenation and treatment of water.

Saraswati 2.0 is a multi-institutional project that aims to identify and evolve affordable technologies for wastewater and solutions to address the challenges of water use in urban and rural India.

Three plants will be set  up at IIT Kharagpur to produce re-usable treated water as well as to analyse if the treated water can be further exploited and treated so that the compost or value added products produced is free of pathogens.  This will help farmers to use the compost.

The facilities to be set up include an anaerobic digester with bio-electro chemical filter; another with photoheterotropic bioreactor and a plant for ultrasonic treatment of sludge.

IIT Kharagpur Aditya Choubey Center for Re-water Research professor-in-charge Makarand Madhao Ghangrekar said:  “IIT Kharagpur is the principal investigator and partner for three pilot projects. We will be using different technologies, the success of which will be evaluated based on the performance of the pilot plants”.

Seven more pilot facilities will be established in partnership with other Indian institutes.

Saraswati 2.-0 will see the transfer of European technologies to India.

These technologies will be tested, demonstrated, and customised as per Indian requirements at an affordable cost.

Once the technologies are tested and tried, these will deployed for the entire Indian population.

With a funding overlay of INR 150m ($2.1m), the project has been selected for the EU-India Joint Call on Research and Innovation for Water programme.

EU and GoI will invest INR 3.23bn ($44.36m) in different projects related to water.

IIIT Kharagpur will manage the project along with its lead European partner, BOKU (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna).

The other Indian partners in this project include IIT Madras, IIT Bhubaneswar, IIT Roorkee, NITIE, Mumbai, MNIT Jaipur, TERI School of Advanced Studies.