As of the most recent published count from 2020-2021, there were 1,093 sewage treatment plants with operational capabilities of just 26.9 billion liters of wastewater per day, indicating that only 37% of India’s wastewater is treated.
Waste management is an issue in rural and heavily populated cities, as is the case with the rapid population expansion and urbanization in many developing nations.
An exemplary case of this growth surpassing the capacity of infrastructure can be found in urban hotspots in India such as Delhi, where neighborhoods are described as having “open gutters […] filled with plastic and grey-colored water” in a May 2023 report by Euronews, as Statista’s Florian Zandt explains below. The capacity for treating water is still woefully inadequate, even though the number of sewage treatment plants in service increased between 2014 and 2020.
India produced 72.4 billion liters of wastewater per day across all provinces, according to the Central Pollution Control Board’s most recent annual report. Of this total, Maharashtra (9.1 billion), Uttar Pradesh (8.3 billion), Tamil Nadu (6.4 billion), and Gujarat (5.0 billion) accounted for about 40% of the wastewater.
As of the most recent published count from 2020/2021, there were 1,093 sewage treatment plants with operational capabilities of just 26.9 billion liters of wastewater per day; approximately 400 units were either non-operational or under development. This means that just 37% of sewage is treated, which increases the likelihood of food and drinking water contamination and infectious disease outbreaks.
Even though India’s population seems to produce more wastewater than it can handle, efforts to provide more people with access to drinkable water, basic sanitation, and hygiene have increased dramatically in the last several years. For instance, the 2014 launch of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan program, also known as Clean India, intends to create more than 100 million toilets nationwide to end open defecation.
However, according to data from the WHO and Unicef’s Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene, in 2022, only 75% of rural Indian households had at least basic access to sanitation, and 30% of homes lacked a sink for doing a daily wash with soap and water.
Last year, GreatGameIndia reported a shocking study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances, which revealed that recycling releases microplastics into the water supply.
