Integrated Management of Wastewater through Sewage Fed Aquaculture for Resource Recovery and Reuse of Treated Effluent: A Case Study

Abstract

India has 18% of the world's population, 1.15 billion people, but access to only 4% of world's fresh water resources. In the recent past, the dependency of Indian agriculture on ground water resources has increased upto an enormous extent due to several factors including increased demand of food, erratic behavior of monsoon, developmental pressure of various allied sectors etc. Currently, the available 70% of water resources in India being used to fulfill the water demand for agriculture and the 80% of domestic water supplies come from groundwater which led to rapidly declining groundwater tables in most of the states in India and has found no longer sustainable. Present study has primarily highlights the need of the Indian conditions for treatment and reuse of wastewater which happens to be the main cause for pollution of water resources in India. In this study efforts were made for assessment the potential of model sewage fed aquaculture system of capacity 8 MLD in Karnal, India for wastewater treatment, reuse and resource recovery during the treatment process. The in-depth evaluation study were conducted for integrated assessment of STP in association with health, environment, society, and institutions aspects as well as quality of treated effluent subjected for reuse in irrigation. The Economic analysis of the model sewage-fed aquaculture system shows that there was an annual profit of INR 8-10 lakhs through selling of fish in local market as well as ample amount of revenue generated through selling of treated effluent to the farmers. Also, the irrigation with treated wastewater able to save the fertilizer upto 50kg of Urea and 50kg of diammonium phosphate during cultivation of one acre of crop annually. The system was found good for removal of physic-chemical pollutants and also found very effective in removal of bacteriological pollutants. The reported removals for total coliform, fecal coliform and fecal streptococci were found 99.988, 99.965 and 99.9567, respectively.