WATER4INDIA · Smart, Cost-effective Solutions for Water Treatment and Monitoring in Small Communities in India. Decision Support System Integration

Fresh water of sufficient quality for human consumption is becoming a scarce resource and its availability is a concerning issue in India whose growing wealth and population create increasing needs leading to higher water consumption while quality standards for drinking water are being enhanced. In this context the overall objective of Water4India consists in studying the different centralized and decentralized options for water treatment at community level in India taking into account resource availability, management, treatment solutions, water quality, economic, environmental and social factors. Water monitoring is of capital importance at each step of the process: different technologies will be considered in the frame of a Water Safety Plan. A Decision Support System (DSS) will be developed based on the previously stated information to assess policy makers take the appropriate decisions to solve the existing problem with drinking water.Water4India will deliver two forms of water availability assessment: the quality and quantity of available waterand the resource management with information on current and expected water requirements. The quality ofavailable water will be studied using Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment.The DSS must find the optimal solution considering not only its cost but the overall sustainability of the process, paying particular attention to energy consumption and obtaining for this purpose, the friendliness of the proposed technologies and their adaptation to the social environment. The proposed technologies of the DSS will be applied in two places with different climatic and social situations that will constitute the pilot sites validating the developed work. Finally, a dissemination and best practice step will be carried out in order to define how the results of the project will be communicated to users and guarantee large scale implementation results which can be widely deployed into EU-India water technological business network.