EU, India to tackle key water challenges

NEWDELHI: India and the European Union on Thursday decided to jointly invest up to 40 million euros on seven research and innovation projects, including on Ganga rejuvenation, to tackle the urgent water challenges in the country.

The Delegation of the European Union to India and the Indian government’s science and technology, and biotechnology departments on Thursday announced the seven projects that have been selected under the Eu-india Joint Call on Research and Innovation for Water. The selected projects will develop new or adapt the most suitable existing innovative and affordable solutions for Indian conditions, both in urban and rural areas, thus providing some key solutions to the urgent water challenges, an EU statement said. The EU, through its research and innovation programme ‘Horizon 2020’, and the Indian government will invest a total of up to EUR 40 million (~323 crore) on seven projects, which have an average duration of four years. The key focus areas of these projects include improving the quality of drinking water, waste water management and real-time moni- toring and control systems.

In total, 130 entities will be part of these seven projects, ranging from universities, research labs, private sector and municipalities. Those participating in the projects will include prestigious institutions such as IITBombay, Iit-guwahati, IITBhubaneswar, Iit-roorkee, IITDelhi, Csir-national Environmental Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-NEERI) and TERI.

Besides supporting India’s Ganga Rejuvenation initiative, the projects will also support transfer of European technologies to India, which would require them to be tested, demonstrated, and customised to suit Indian needs at an affordable cost, the statement said.

The cooperation will also lead to increased scientific excellence while ensuring that at the end of the project, the technology can be deployed and be of benefit to the entire Indian population, it said. “Many of these water challenges are common to India and EU. We have, in the past, collaborated intensively on water, enriching each other’s technological and scientific knowledge and management capacities to cope with stress on water resources,” said Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of the European Union to India.