The world over, former industrial giants are turning to green technologies to fix the environmental damage already done. Europe’s industrial giant, Germany, is on the brink of getting all the energy it needs from renewable sources. Oslo turns its waste into energy. Pittsburgh has clear blue skies; undreamt off by its inhabitants a hundred years ago. There are fish in the Thames. Only India and China seem to be caught in a nineteenth century time warp of dirty skies, filthy rivers, and slum-clustered urbanization.
But there is a scientific solution, and it comes from India’s military-scientific establishment: the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Better known for their military hardware, scientists from the DRDO have found a bacteria under the Antarctic ice which they claim can eat sewage.
Called a ‘psychrophile’, it thrives in cold climates. But where DRDO initially sought to use it in bio-toilets on the high frontiers of the Himalayas, it’s a technology that could rescue citizens from filth and disease, and help clean up our messy environment as well.
DRDO has designed a very simple sewage bio-digester, to replace septic tanks, which will be loaded with an inoculum of this bacteria, refined and multiplied by the bacteria in cow-dung. In theory, the combination of bacteria will clean up the sewage, letting out safe, clean water that can be used for irrigating gardens. A scientific challenge has been mounted and the jury is still out on the biodigester’s versatility and efficiency, but there is no doubt that something like a scientific breakthrough has been achieved, though this may still need some refining under India’s varied field conditions.
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