TERI and Ramboll Foundation plan to introduce River Bank Filtration Technology (RBF) for this project, which is new to Goa but has been used for the Ganges and Haridwar.
At a press conference on Monday, TERI officials informed that the project has been undertaken with the idea of lending clean water for agriculture and irrigation purposes for the surrounding areas of River Sal. The project will be inaugurated on January 27 in Mandopa at the hands of Fisheries Minister Avertano Furtado and in the presence of Dr R K Pachauri, Head of TERI. Pachauri will also give a special talk on the issue at the launch function.
The project will include digging of two bore wells near the river bank, where the water will flow in through various filtration procedures and will later be filtered again into the second well and pumped out to the final users.
“The idea of filtering water is to give it to the farmers and agriculturists in the vicinity so that they increase their produce and generate more income,” said Thomas Boving, PhD, Geosciences/Civil and Environmental Engineering from Kingston.
The organisations will initially conduct several tests on the water of the River Sal for a year and later decide their course of action.
“The water filtration we have done in the past has been used for farming and also for consumption by villagers of Karnataka because of the technology being totally chemical free and tested,” informed Kavita Patil, Research Associate at Coastal, Ecology and Marine Resource Centre.
The organisation also boasts of having their own power generation via solar panels and will use their own power during the day to run the various machineries. They also boast of purifying the Kali River near Dandeli and informed that the water with proper processing is being used for consumption by the people there.
This was followed by an inspection of the ongoing desilting work at the River Sal in Navelim by the Fisheries Minister and Navelim panchayat.
