Tata Steel Mining to conduct water audits at its five facilities in Odisha

New Delhi: Tata Steel Mining Ltd on Tuesday said it has decided to conduct water audits at five of its operational facilities in Odisha to ensure more efficient use of the resource and its conservation. The company has partnered with New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) for the proposed exercise.

The initiative focuses on comprehensive water audits involving the use and balance of the resource, quality profiling, identification of water losses and leakages, the company said in a statement.

It also said this will enable TSML to develop an integrated industrial water management strategy that optimises efficient use of water and improves productivity of the resource at its units.

TSML has also tied up with FluxGen Engineering Technologies, a Karnataka-based company working on water solutions, to install AquaGen mechanism to reduce consumption of the resource, the statement said.

AuqaGen is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that will give a secure and single-window access system to digital data of the entire water infrastructure on parameters such as water flow and bore-well water level.

Speaking on these initiatives, TSML Managing Director Pankaj Kumar Satija said, "Water being a critical national resource, we are focusing on zero down groundwater withdrawal and a 30 per cent reduction in surface water intake by 2030."

To begin with, TSML, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Steel, is deploying AquaGen at its Sukinda chromite mine in Jajpur and ferroalloy plant at Athagarh in Cuttack district, the statement said.

In a bid to ensure fulfilment of its commitment of net zero wastewater discharge, TSML has developed a 108-million litres per day capacity onsite central effluent treatment plant (ETP) at Sukinda chromite mine.

The company is also working to install another central ETP of 1,200 cubic metre per hour capacity for its Saruabil and Kamarda chromite mines in Sukinda.

Its ferroalloy plants at Gopalpur in Ganjam district and Athagarh in Cuttack have onsite effluent treatment plants.

(With PTI inputs)

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