Water

India and the Netherlands also have agreed to a strategic water partnership and have a Joint Working Group on Water at the Ministerial level. TU Delft researchers and Indian counterparts collaborate on many projects in the water domain.

For example, TU Delft leads the LotusHR project on the local treatment of sewage and healthy reuse. King Willem-Alexander & Queen Maxima opened the associated vertical wastewater treatment plant in 2019. The project aims to develop universal water management and risk assessment strategies that are applicable for megacities all around the world.

TU Delft and Indian collaborations also include projects focused on the sustainable and equitable water solutions for agriculture, such as Water Efficiency in Sustainable Cotton-based Production Systems; in this project TU Delft is collaborating with NGO Solidaridad Asia to improve the resilience of cotton farmers. In Gujarat, another team of researchers from TU Delft and IWMI are employing novel sociohydrological approach that not only simulates the hydrology but also farmer’s decisions, feedback, and their interactions with groundwater. Collaborating with government ministries and departments, international development agencies and private partners, the collaboration aims to upscale the developed sociohydrological methods and tools to other Indian basins for design and implementation of water technology interventions for agriculture considering unintended consequences such as surprising depletion of groundwater levels.

The Water4Change (W4C) brings together academics from the Netherlands and India to addresses the complex challenges to urban water systems faced by fast-growing secondary cities in India and the sustainability transitions that are needed for short- and long-term mitigation of, adaptation to and coping with urgencies and uncertainties. Focused on three cities (Bhopal, Bhuj, Kozhikode), W4C aims to enable water sensitive development, accounting for site specificities, knowledge and practices, presenting innovative interventions, practices and design, and policy guidelines.

TU Delft is also a partner in the EU project Pavitra Ganga on innovative, cost effective and energy efficient solutions for the treatment of (unregulated) drains.

TU Delft researchers contribute to the EU project SARASWATI 2.0, which aims to identify the best available as well as affordable technologies for decentralized wastewater treatment with scope of resource/energy recovery and reuse in rural and urban areas of India. TUD is leader of the work package on automation and control, alongside IIT Madras.

In the HIROS project (https://www.hiros.in/home), TU Delft, together with Wageningen University and IrriWatch, collaborates with Indian universities and research institutes to develop a package of agri-water interventions and solutions that reduces the significant groundwater over-exploitation and improves the surface water quality in the Hindon river basin. TU Delft develops and applies remote sensing data fusion methods which, combined with hydrological process models, produce vital information on water stocks and flows in this data-sparse and heavily irrigated region.