HYDERABAD: Hyderabad became the second city in the country and the first in Telangana to install the Online Continuous Effluent Monitoring System (OCEMS) at 25 Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) maintained by Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB).
The OCEMS provides online monitoring of treated effluent parameters like Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Total Suspended Solids (TSS) and pH value. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has made it mandatory for all the cities having STPs to install OCEMS.
Speaking to Express, HMWS&SB Managing Director M Dana Kishore informed that the Water Board maintains the 25 STPs in GHMC limits with a sewage treatment capacity of 772 million litres per day (MLD).
The Telangana State Pollution Control Board (TSPCB) monitors the treated effluent parameters of the all STPs. All the senior HMWS&SB officials have access to the OCEMS platform through a mobile application to monitor the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) of the STPs. The Water Board will obtain the readings for parameters at the inlets and outlets of all STPs.
If any parameter is more than the permissible standards, the concerned officer can check the data for the past week and implement remedial measures to bring the parameters within permissible levels, Dana Kishore said.Earlier, the CPCB had made OCEMS mandatory for industries where Effluent Treatment Plants (ETPs) were established, while the same has now been extended to STPs.
The Boards officials said that OCE assess the various physico-chemical parameters and bacteriological characteristics and the system also aims at monitoring the discharge standards regularly. The Board will obtain the readings for parameters at the inlets and outlets of all STPs for pH, BOD, COD, TSS, faecal choliform, dissolved oxygen (DO) and other parameters. STPs have been established based on various technologies, including Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) Reactor, Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR), Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) and Extended Aeration among others.