What treatment?
Regulation has not worked for drug industry
It is not as if industry and government have not worked to control pollution. Two common effluent-treatment plants (cetps) were set up in Andhra Pradesh. The Patancheru cetp, which started functioning in 1994, has a capacity of 7.5 million litres a day (mld), while the other at Jeedimetla in Ranga Reddy district, established in 1989 and run by Jeedimetla Effluent Treatment Limited (jetl), can treat 5 mld. The cetps were set up so that effluents from small-scale units could be collected and treated.
These plants remain underutilized, though the manufacture of drugs has increased manifold. Currently, jetl utilizes only 33 per cent of its installed capacity, and industrial waste is only 14 per cent of the total waste it treats.Similarly, only 20 per cent of petl's capacity is utilized. Nobody can explain why this is happening. Is it because wastewater generated by the units has 
decreased in spite of increased production? Or is it because the industries are generating wastewater which is not reaching the cetp?
The problem is partly because effluents are transported to the cetps in tankers. And nobody has an account of the total wastewater that should be transported. appcb says it does not have up-to-date data on water use and effluent generation. Board officials were reluctant to share even
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