Bureaucrats sceptical about desalination

Even as chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has announced that the Maharashtra government’s plans to set up desalination plants, civic officials are still sceptical over its feasibility. Just a couple of months ago, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had turned down the proposal of desalination plants, citing their enormous cost and lack of land.

Speaking in the state legislative council, Mr Fadnavis had said that despite desalination projects being very expensive, the state government was mulling over the possibility of setting up these plants. “We will soon prepare a project report on desalination plants,” he had said.

Desalination is the process in which some amount of salt and other minerals are removed from saline water to produce fresh water suitable for human consumption or irrigation.

However, civic officials have said that previous efforts to set up desalination plants in Mumbai have failed owing to huge expenditure and lack of land.

According to civic officials, the state government had appointed a high-level committee to study and suggest measures for setting up desalination plants in Mumbai. The committee recommended the installation of two pilot plants of 100 million litres daily (MLD) capacity each — one for the city, to be set up by the BMC, and another for suburbs and metropolitan areas, to be set up by the MMRDA. However, collectors of city and suburbs and Mumbai Port Trust expressed inability to carry out the plan, saying that the 25 acres of land required for the project could not be made available at the coastal side.

The civic body had also sought help from private investors to set up desalination plants. But they too backed out due to unavailability of land. “The cost required for setting up of 100-MLD desalination plant is Rs 1,000 crore. The large-scale desalination uses large amounts of energy and specialised expensive infrastructure, making it more costly than fresh water from conventional sources, such as rivers or ground water,” a senior civic official said.

The cost of desalinated water comes to Rs 70 for 1,000 litres, whereas the civic body supplies the same amount of water to residential users for just Rs 4.32. Hence, desalinated water would be too expensive for the common man, he added.