A Mongolian team led by Mr. T. Gantumur, General Manager of Ulaanbaatar City and Head of the Mayor’s Office, 6 representatives of UB City Municipality and 2 partner ministries (Ministry of Construction and Urban Development, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, National Secretariat for MCC) visited Nagpur City, India from 18-22 March 2017 to learn best practices in sustainable water management.

The third largest city in India’s Maharashtra state with 2.5 million inhabitants, Nagpur City is pioneering best practice in supplying treated wastewater from wastewater treatment plants to the Combined Heat and Power plants (CHPs) for use mainly in cooling towers. In this way, Nagpur City will be able to introduce integrated resource management practices such as the conservation of water resources, ensuring sustainable and reliable water supply to power plants, reuse of water for agricultural purposes and production of the biogas out of sludge.

A wastewater treatment plant with the capacity of 200,000 m3 is now under construction (an existing 100,000 m3 wastewater treatment plant is being expanded) in Nagpur City using the private public partnership (PPP) model with a total investment of USD 40 million and a concession period of 30 years. The private operator company who runs this plant is responsible for 100 per cent of the investment.

The visitors learned that in order to reuse the treated waste water in power plants and other enterprises, a third cleaning stage is introduced in the plant treating the waste water up to the required standard. The private company has the right to sell the treated waste water to earn revenue.

This best practice has been already introduced by another treatment plant located nearby using polluted river water as the source. The treated water is delivered to the thermal power plant, also the owner of the treatment plant, for electricity generation. This is a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant with a capacity of 130,000 m3. Moreover, by digesting the sludge, biogas is being produced and transformed into concentrated natural gas (CNG), which will be used as green fuel for public buses.

During their stay in Nagpur City, the Mongolian Delegation was welcomed by Ms. Nanda Jichkar, the new Mayor of Nagpur City and Mr. Shravan Hardikar, Commissioner. At the meeting, Mr. Hardikar gave a detailed presentation of Nagpur’s Smart City Programme. This project has been elaborated based on a residents’ survey and study. According to the survey, most residents voted for secure traffic and reliable water supply.

The Smart City programme, which incorporates the introduction of smart traffic and street monitoring, smart LED lighting, public WIFI environment, smart solid waste collection (bins equipped with sensors), glass cable network and a “24х7 Water” system, was demonstrated to the Delegation via site visits.