Manage water demand in India through Private Public Participation mode: CII

SINGAPORE: Implementation of Private Public Participation (PPP) schemes in India is the way forward to managing water supply and demand in the country, industry body CII has said.

Indians need to use recycled water for the industries, set up more desalination plants and harvest rain water with the help of PPP-led technologies, CII executive member of national water committee, Mukund Vasudevan said at the Singapore International Water Week yesterday.

He said CII is talking to various states on the PPP schemes, and there was more and more acceptance to outsourcing water services then before.

CII agenda, among others, was to promote at the state and municipality levels on the water usage in the industries and agricultural sector.

The agricultural sector, India's biggest consumer of water, needs to introduce drip-irrigation while industries needs to reduce water usage through recycling what have been used, he told the forum on water business in India.

Vasudevan also called for tiered water pricing across the country.

"If you manage pricing, you will automatically manage water supply," he said, adding: "We are working with the government on how to create structure pricing".

The pricing structure should cover all -- industries, agriculture and consumers, even those below poverty line.

India has enough water but it is distributed unevenly and it is politically challenging to re-distribute through national network.

One good national project has been the connecting of rivers but that 50-year-old scheme has been slowed by politics and differences between different states, he pointed out.

Vasudevan said investors in water projects would want an average of 15 per cent return on their investment and given the potential, it is viable based on the scope of water requirement in India.