Appropriate technologies and innovations can play a pivotal role in making available safe and clean drinking water to the rural population in our country. If technologies and innovations are equipped with the insight of traditional knowledge system of India, then drinking water supply in rural parts of the country can be realized. A rational approach is also essential to achieve this goal.

Testing of Drinking water:

• Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has specified drinking water quality standards in India to provide safe drinking water to the people.
• It is necessary that drinking water sources should be tested regularly to know whether water is meeting the prescribed standards for drinking or not and, if not, then, the extent of contamination/unacceptability and the follow-up required.
• In the short term, chemical constituents in groundwater do not change much, therefore testing once a year for chemical contaminants is adequate.
• Testing for bacteriological contamination is recommended 4 times a year, once in every season.
• However, every year it should be carried out at least twice, during pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons.

Drinking Water Treatment:

• The choice of treatment technologies would be largely determined by the quality of water and the nature of demand.
• Few of the basic water treatment technologies/ methods are discussed below:
  • Slow sand filters (SSF): It purifies the water efficiently by reducing turbidity and bacterial contamination.
  • Chlorination: Being a strong oxidant, chlorine is used to remove taste and odour, as well as biological contamination.
  • Solar Disinfection (SODIS): A clean and transparent PET plastic bottle is filled with water and kept in direct sunlight for 6 hours during noon on sunny days and two days if the sky is more than 50 % clouded. It has no chemical and external energy requirements thus making it an affordable choice. It removes 99.9 % of microorganisms.
  • Capacitive deionization (CDI): It is a technology in which a separator channel (with a porous electrode on each side) removes ions from water.
  • Ozonation: It is based on the ozone infusion into the water for chemical water treatment.
  • Ultra Violet filters: ultraviolet light is used to kill microorganisms in
  • TERAFIL is a burnt red clay porous media used for filtration & treatment of raw water into clean drinking water. This technology has been developed by the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).
  • OS-Community scale Arsenic Filter is an organic arsenic filter which is developed by IIT
  • Other Technologies: Flocculent treatment, Ceramic candle, and Ion Exchange (IEX).

Reverse Osmosis Plants:

• A large majority of contaminants are removed in reverse osmosis (RO) technology through a semipermeable
• The World Health Organization recommends that humans get between 10 — 20% of our daily needs for minerals from drinking water.
• The human body absorbs minerals 30% faster and easier from water than it does from food.
• The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has given acceptable/permissible limits to the number of minerals in drinking water.
• Water that is too high on a certain type of minerals might cause health problems.
• Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) maintains a MIS portal to keep track of the number.
• RO, as a purification technology, is infamous because of the huge quantity of reject water, the system ejects in the process of purification.
• The reject water contains highly concentrated minerals, which can further aggravate the groundwater levels in the region.
• It can be channelled for use in local school toilets, as it is done in some of the Rajasthan villages.
• RO technology tends to filter out or remove essential minerals as well, even when they are well within permissible limits.
• Therefore, RO Plants should be set up only in places that have water quality problems, as certified by water quality laboratories.

Water App for monitoring water supply schemes:

• The RWS mobile App has been developed by the Ministry in technical collaboration with National Informatics Centre for monitoring of schemes on state, district, block, panchayat and village levels.
• Using this App, the user can upload the photographs of beneficiaries /Source /Delivery Points using a Smartphone.
• At present this facility has been provided to state government officials, as a tool for reporting the progress of NRDWP to the central Ministry.

Drinking Water Quality Monitoring:

• The Integrated Management Information System (IMIS) facilitates the Ministry and the line departments to monitor the coverage status of rural habitations and population with potable drinking water.
• The system has details of over 16 lakh habitations and more than 60 lakh drinking water supply schemes which include both Piped Water Supply schemes, stand posts/taps and spot sources like open wells, hand pumps etc.
• The status of quality affected habitations and population and its coverage with safe potable water is regularly monitored on this platform.
• The system also provides a platform to the district and block water testing laboratories to upload the water sample test reports.
• SMS and email automation is also used to generate daily basis SMS alerts and sent to Ministry officials for monitoring of daily MPR reported, expenditure habitation covered etc.

Communication and Educational Innovation:

• The internet has inspired innovations in the areas of water and sanitation, which have long needed fundamental changes in terms of available information and communication technology.
• With the internet and other new technological tools, simple, appropriate technologies for the supply of water can be implemented within weeks rather than years.
• In the past, as a part of the Millennium Development Goal 7, United Nations created an innovative program called WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) which is essential for all time in improving people’s health, education and lifestyle, as well as in reducing poverty around the world.