The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the European Union (EU) are jointly working on an integrated bio-treated waste water project -- Water4Crops-India - to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihood in India and the EU.
“Under the initiative, EU and India will share technologies and expertise for recycling of industrial and domestic waste water for agricultural use to improve the livelihood of the rural poor particularly those in the country’s dryland areas,” Antonio Lopez, director of CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), EU consortium, said addressing media here.
The Hyderabad-headquartered International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat) is leading the consortium of 12 national partners in the implementation of India’s component of the four-year project, which costs around 12-million euro.
The consortium will work on the Charminar Breweries of SABMiller, an onion and fruit processing plant at Jalgaon, and Ugar Sugar’s factory in Karnataka, SP Wani, principal scientist (Waterseds) at Icrisat, said.
In India, the project will be implemented at several industrial complexes including at Ion Exchange India Limited and Larsen & Toubro, along with various academic and research organisations, including Icrisat. “We will also encourage micro-entrepreneurs in rural areas and small towns to take up the project at a smaller scale at the village panchayat level,” he said.
The DBT is also carrying out several similar projects with the EU as part of its international collaboration initiative. “The DBT is currently working on some small and large-scale projects with the EU, including a stem cell project and a joint-research project on juvenile diabetes with Denmark,” Shailja Vaidya Gupta, director at DBT, said adding they had funded Rs 60 crore for such international collaborative research projects.