Contextualizing Odisha’s Sewerage Problem

The sanitation crisis in Odisha is one of the worst in the country, with a vast majority of the population underserved by existing infrastructure (India Water Portal). The problem continues to escalate, with an influx of people moving in from nearby towns and villages adding to the populations density, particularly in slums, further exacerbating the problem of poor sanitation infrastructure.

An increasing population density means increased pressures on the existing infrastructure. As the number of people accessing the existing infrastructure grows, it becomes a litmus test for the quality of the sanitation services being provided by the local governments, bringing to light the primary stresses and failing points of current sanitation solutions.

The increased population density is also worrying in the sense of the increased risk of communicable diseases and the speed with which these diseases can be transmitted throughout the populace.

More people also means a drop in open urban spaces available for sanitation purposes, with pressures on land area also causing safety concerns for women and children, for whom privacy and security are vital concerns.

All these factors combine to highlight the vast gap in unmet sanitation needs for India over all and Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in particular.

Odisha faces a further problem in the design of adequate infrastructure, due to several unique environmental restrictions.

With over 1,500 millimetres of rainfall annually, Odisha enjoys one of the highest water tables in India. While this is an asset to the primarily agrarian economy of the state, it has negative impacts on the design of sanitation systems, since most current infrastructure depends on designs that are built with the idea of both grey and black water from sanitation facilities being leached into the ground over long periods of time.

These designs cannot perform as designed when you consider that a high water table dramatically impacts the rate at which this leaching can happen. This leads to an increased requirement for ‘honey-suckers’ and other models of waste water collection.

This collected waste water is then transported to remote treatment plants that consume large amounts of power and cannot provide adequate filtration before the waste water is dumped into nearby rivers or other water bodies, further increasing health risks to the population and causing ecological damage at unsustainable scales.