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| Desalination Plant in Sorek, Israel. |
India has a coastline of 7500km and yet it struggles to provide unlimited water to its citizens, farmers and industries. In the words of Socialist Dr. Lohia, 'India's Shakti (here women) are capable to solve innumerable problems of themselves and Bharat Bhoomi in whole but first, we need to provide them with toilets and water'. India's newly formed Jal Shakti Ministry has released the target to provide potable tap water to every household by 2024.
Despite having such a huge coastline and massive rivers like Ganga, Godavari and Brahmaputra, we Indians suffer due to lackluster planning and low investments in Water Technology. Israel, the land with no river provides 24x7 potable water to its citizens and farmers, thanks to the adoption of scientific Sea Water Desalination technology.
It's not that desalination tech is something new to India. Reliance Industries produces desalinated water for its Jamnagar refinery and even provides additional water to Jamnagar Municipal Corp at a fee. Chennai drinks desalinated water from one of its desalinated plants on East Coast Road. In fact, Indian companies like VA TECH WABAG, Essel Infraprojects and L&T have been awarded works to set up desalination plants in abroad and India. City nations like Singapore, Qatar, Kuwait are using Desalination for decades. Recently, Morocco has awarded a contract to a Spanish firm to build 'Africa's Largest Seawater Desalination Plant' in the city of Adagir.
In 2017, Spain's Abengoa signed contracts to develop a desalination and irrigation project in the Agadir region. The project, valued €309 million, involves the construction of a desalination plant with a 275,000 m3 total production capacity of desalinated water per day which will be the largest plant designed for drinking water and irrigation. The contract also provides for the possible capacity expansion to up to 450,000 m3/day.
The project involves increasing plant capacity to 150,000 m3/d of drinking water. And the second project calls for the additional production of 125,000 m3/d of irrigation water as well as the construction of the corresponding irrigation network for a total of 13,600 ha. Project operations can be powered on renewable power with a focus to meet the demand for water for domestic use in addition to irrigation water needs in the area of Agadir.
Farmers have also contributed MAD 10,000 (1 MAD - INR 7.24) to the financing of the station. The government has promised them desalinated water for irrigation at a low price of MAD 5 per cubic meters in exchange for the investment in construction.
As of now, the world's largest sea water desalination plant is located in Saudi Arabia. The Ras Al Khair plant has a desalination capacity of 1,036,000 m3/day.
