Urban Water Supply Strategies for Hyderabad, India – Future Scenarios

To keep pace with population and economic growth, the city of Hyderabad, India, will need to identify and develop new supply sources almost continually. Increasing population growth rate, declining surface water resources, overexploitation of groundwater, deterioration of ground water quality and poor sewage treatment are the major water-related issues in Hyderabad. This paper reviews the current situation facing policy makers who need to come to terms with the problem of restricted water supply and increasing demand in an urban centre such as Hyderabad, India. The City Water Balance model developed in this study can be used to analyse different scenarios that include water conservation, urban wastewater reuse and improvement of distribution and conveyance efficiency. Water conservation programs, which include a 5% conveyance efficiency improvement, reusing 90 million cubic metres (MCM) of urban runoff and adoption of water harvesting by 0.5 million households together with recycling 120 MCM of wastewater recycling wastewater would be sufficient to meet the water demand by 2031, if the population grows at a rate of 2.5%.