The Census of 2011 estimated that only 35% of the then 100 million Indian urban households were connected to a sewage system of any kind, implying that India had no visibility on the onward movement of sewage beyond the toilets in most urban households. This was over and above the sewage emitted from the nearly 140 million rural households, the status of which was equally opaque. One and a half decades later and without a new census, we can only conjecture if the needle has shifted substantially on this count.

Let us assume reasonably, based on markers like the growth of non-agri commerce and housing, that since 2011, urbanisation would have grown around 30%. In that case, the current sewage generated from the households in class 1 cities (468 with a population of more than 100,000 as per census of 2011) and class 2 cities (3,744 with a population of more than 50,000 as per census of 2011) in India would stand at more than 33,000 million litres per day (MLD). Against this generated sewage in urban India, the total existing installed capacity of sewage treatment plants (STPs) is a meagre 6,190 MLD, with an additional 1,743 MLD capacity still under-development. Taking both into account, India’s sewage processing capacity stands at an abysmal 24% of the total sewage generated in urban India alone, and the less said about rural India, the better.

Differently put, the Indian state’s sewage processing capacity is at the same level as our literacy and electricity penetration in the early decades after independence. 

We can shun this severe lack of sewage infrastructure as a handicap of a developing nation that needs to prioritise roads, trains and airports, but being a 60% private consumption-led economy that likes to flex its economic might among the top five nations on the planet, India needs to confront the reality that when this large an economy is enticed with consumption-led growth, the aftermath of that consumption also grows proportionally. The growth of malls, hotels, private hospitals, eateries, banquet halls, condominiums, factories, offices, quick commerce and food deliveries cannot happen sans the accompanying waste. Yet it is precisely this point about sewage infrastructure that India’s polity has consistently overlooked.

In the Union budget of 2023 for instance, road infrastructure was assigned an eye-watering Rs 2.7 lakh crores, whereas sewage infrastructure was clubbed with drinking water and received an allocation of Rs 60,000 crores under one scheme and Rs 80,000 crores under another.

Even state governments appear to have this scornful attitude towards sewage infrastructure. Still, it seems that the more you ignore sewage, the more it will force you to take heed. Precisely for this reason, it is disfiguring India’s water bodies with faecal contamination, causing excessive algae growth, foul odour and ecological degradation. Dumping of untreated sewage is stressing public health and exacerbating the pollution crisis. People living on the margins particularly in slums and low-income housing clusters bear the brunt of this in the form of contaminated drinking water and vector diseases. 

This issue has consistently and repeatedly featured in most cases of pollution heard by the judiciary across the country. For instance, while hearing a matter relating to the implementation of Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 in Delhi, the Supreme Court in January of this year observed that it is unacceptable that 3,000 tonnes of solid waste remained untreated in the national capital daily and that the government has no resolution planned before 2027. Similarly, in a recent report of the Uttarakhand Pollution Control Board, it said that the water in the Ganga at Haridwar was found to be unfit for drinking. Ironically, Haridwar is the first city through which the river enters the plains and one of the holiest of cities for Hindus. Such hard evidence on record is an admission of the helplessness of the state that stands idly by and stares at the lack of sewage infrastructure for handing the collection, processing and recycling of human waste.

But chronic under-investment in sewage infrastructure is just one part of India’s miserable record with sewage. India also does not have an institutional framework to manage whatever minuscule infrastructure that it has managed to install till date. Anywhere between 25-30% of India’s installed sewage treatment plant (STP) capacity at any point in time lies defunct for the want of maintenance, funds, spare parts or human capability. Such an abysmal rate of downtime of its sewage infrastructure exists for the want of an institutional mechanism that can lay down guidelines for technology, operating procedures and training of human talent to manage these STPs.

India also does not have a working model that defines financial and operating principles. For instance, once STPs are installed, how should these operate at high up-times? What happens when there are breakdowns? What is the budget needed to operate these STPs and under what heads should it be allocated? What is the measurement and monitoring system for these STPs? How many engineers and technicians are required to run them? What should their qualifications be? Do we have a pipeline of environmental and sanitation engineers and technicians to manage these STPs? What will be the onward movement of sludge and water from these STPs? What is the mitigation system in the cases of lapses? All these questions may sound commonsensical for any engineering intervention, but in the lack of it, the Indian state pulls such stunts that would be hilarious if the subject matter was anything other than sewage. In a recent revelation in Gurugram Municipal Corporation, it was found that an electrical engineer hired to run the electricity infrastructure of the city was tasked to run the city’s STPs because the necessary talent needed to run STPs was not on the rolls.

In a one-of-its-kind study conducted by IIT Rourkee in 2023 on the Ganga water sewage treatment plant, it was found that the sludge had a high potential to be used as fertilizer and bricks, after treatment for heavy metals, nitrogen and phosphorous. The study stated that this sludge could be classified into Class A and Class B as per the norms established by United States Environment Protection Agency. While Class A sludge is safe to be used as fertilizer for edible crops, Class B is unsafe for such use. Most of the sludge found was Class B. This is the conclusion of a study on only one cluster. Now imagine the scientific research and investigation needed for 33,000 MLD of sewage in the whole of urban India.

Recycling of sludge cannot be pursued in any seriousness in the absence of this kind of precise and comprehensive data on sludge. At present, India does not even have a scientific hypothesis that can be used to create a framework for managing the onward movement of sludge from the installed STPs.

India needs to urgently increase the funding allocation for building sewage infrastructure, just to catch up. This means nearly Rs 1 lakh crores towards asset building alone, not accounting for the land and the pipeline it will require, and another Rs 25,000 crores of annual allocation towards operating costs, merely to bridge the sewage management deficit in urban India. India needs a sewage management board, much on the lines of water and electricity boards as part of the state’s capacity to ensure direction setting and compliance. In the absence of such boards, we lack a baseline definition of optimum penetration and types of STPs required. It should be the responsibility of such boards to determine the types of STPs (mix of off-grid micro STPs versus an industrial scale integrated set-up) on the basis of the population density, source of sewage and urbanisation plans.

India also needs an institutional intervention to train technical manpower to be sanitation experts who should be running these STPs, conducting scientific research and establishing forward linkages for recycled water and sludge. The gap in such expertise of the Indian state towards managing STPs is what has hitherto prevented the private sector from loosening its purse strings and investing in this sector with gusto. India needs to shed biases it has for STP infrastructure and must learn the lesson that a “world class” sewage infrastructure’s multiplier effect is at par with all other infra themes, if not better, on human development and ecological indicators like learning, mother and child health, productivity, and soil and water health.

But as straight forward as it may sound, it is a flight of fantasy, sadly, because the subject of sewage is an orphan in the current scheme of infrastructure expansions envisaged for the country. It has been expelled from the blue-eyed club of glittering airports, swanky bullet trains, zipping highways and the hosting of the Olympics. No nationalist desires India to become the world-beaters on STPs, when selfies with a human congregation on the banks of a polluted river can satiate their chest thumping urges. The fabled “middle class” has checked into condominiums and bought themselves out of this crisis. At the core of all of this is the notion of casteism, which has been associated with sewage for centuries and prevents the consuming class and its representatives from viewing this issue as an exciting engineering problem to solve. Casteism tricks them into viewing it as an issue of impurity for which a class of people are divinely ordained to handle.

This explains society’s callous attitude towards the countless accidents and deaths of sanitation workers who go down into the sewers to keep them running, and the ease with which we live in the presence of unappetising visuals and contaminated surroundings.

Make no mistake, one less aerobridge at the airport, one less lane on the motorway, one less statue of a leader or one less air-conditioned train on the track will not take away from development claims by 2047, but without the treatment of most of the human excreta that India generates, no modicum of development claim will ever stick.

Ankur Bisen is the author of Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change (Macmillan, 2019). The author is on X: @AnkurBisen1 

Ankur Bisen

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