Strategies for Wastewater Management: A Case of (a 1000 year old) Cuttack City

Wastewater management is essential for an old city like Cuttack as the city was created for a much lower population, where systematic town planning could never happen. Most of the storm water drains in Cuttack city has been transformed to sewage drains, polluting the environment and putting the population at risk. The risk becomes more pronounced when the sewage water is improperly discharged into the adjoining rivers, Mahanadi and its tributary Kathjodi. Further, town planning on wastewater management has always been leaning towards centralized wastewater treatment. This paper proposes different low-cost strategies that can be efficiently implemented for wastewater management, for Cuttack city. This research is a field work undertaken across three time frames, first in 2001, then in 2007 and now in 2011.