Case study 2: DEWATS in India - A sustainable approach to wastewater treatment

In the outskirts of rapidly expanding urban areas, peri-urban areas are emerging. In these areas, as Jan explains in the video, there can be many challenges to achieving clean water and sanitation. Should we continue to build extensive sewer networks and centralised treatment plants? Or are there other, more suitable and sustainable approaches we could explore?

In the video, Jan describes some solutions to these sanitation challenges in the form of modular decentralised wastewater treatment system, or short, DEWATS.

Thinking about your own community:

• What type of wastewater treatment system does your neighborhood use?
• Is it a centralised, decentralised, or on-site system?
• Would a decentralised system be more sustainable? Why / Why not?

In the next step, we will be moving to the challenge of rapid urbanization. As we will see, this is an area that has a major impact on the provision of basic needs services, such as the supply of improved water and sanitation.