As the population of Delhi, India, has rapidly increased from 4 million people in 1971 to around 18 million people today, making it the world’s second most populous city, sewage infrastructure has not kept pace, with major threats resulting to the city’s sanitation, river water quality, and overall health of inhabitants. Approximately 55 percent of the population (9.9 million people) in urban Delhi has access to a centralized sewerage system.

In an effort to bring clean water to the under-served communities by 2031, Delhi Jal Board has partnered with AECOM to develop an integrated and sustainable master plan to improve sanitation conditions and enhance the water quality in River Yamuna, the largest tributary river of the Ganges in northern India.

This project covers the entire 1,500-kilometer National Capital Territory of Delhi and is divided broadly into two phases — a sewered area and an un-sewered area. AECOM ensures that comprehensive, technically and financially viable plans – capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expense (OPEX) – are in place for the implementation of both phases.

For the sewered area phase, AECOM is responsible for the following tasks:

  • Auditing 30 existing sewage treatment plants with a design capacity of 512.4 million gallons per day at 17 locations;
  • Hydraulic modeling of the trunk sewer for integration with the unsewered zone;
  • Flow monitoring and wastewater sampling at strategic locations;
  • Conditional assessment of 500 manholes for dovetail approach.

Services provided for the unsewered phase include the following:

  • An extensive topo-survey and geotechnical investigation for 2,200 unsewered colonies;
  • Developing a wastewater management information system, including development of an enterprise geographic information system (GIS) framework, integration and close coupling of sewerage information in the GIS database to carry out hydraulic modeling;
  • Evaluation of the unsewered area for 1,600 remote colonies.

Once complete, every person living in Delhi will have access to clean water — infinitely improving their quality of life and ensuring the same for future generations.

Partners
Delhi Jal Board