A Study of Water Safety Plan (WSP) For Environmental Risk Management of a Modern North Indian City

Abstract

Access to safe drinking water is a basic need for human development, health and well being and because of this it is an internationally accepted human right (WHO, 2011). There has been encouraging progress with access to safe drinking water & sanitation in both rural and urban areas since the United Nations water decade of the 1980s. However, more than 1 billion people around the world still lack access to safe water supplies. A substantial majority of these people live in Asia. Water has many constituents. Some of these are of natural origin & some are manmade and present as contaminants. Some give rise to serious health effects and some will give rise to only aesthetic characteristics. Over the past decade it has become increasingly evident that the delivery of safe & aesthetically acceptable drinking water cannot be assured if it is based on only measurements of water quality parameters & or the performance of a water filtration plant. In view of the uncertainties and the practical difficulty in monitoring the quality of treated water, a risk based approach to managing the quality of drinking water is required. A key advantage of a risk based approach is in avoiding the costs associated with installing inappropriate systems of delivering water. It has been shown that investments in water supply and sanitation can yield a net economic benefit, as the reductions in adverse health effects and health care costs outweigh the costs of undertaking these interventions. The guidelines provided in this thesis are an important contribution to environmental risk assessment and the avoidance of the physical, chemical and microbial contamination of drinking water. The HACCP plan from which this water safety plan extract has been derived is scoped to cover the entire water system from catchment to tap and is dynamic document continually evolving as increased knowledge and experience and present opportunities for improvement. Water safety management demands a quantitative understanding of how processes & actions effect water quality, which in turn requires an understanding of environmental risk assessment. This study is intended to provide guidance on using environmental risk assessment while developing water safety plan to ensure the production of high quality drinking water in a modern North Indian City like Chandigarh.