Dairy owners reject 100-ltr water cap per animal

Ludhiana: Municipal commissioner Neeru Katyal Gupta chaired a high-level inter-departmental meeting at the Zone D office on Thursday to stop dairy owners from dumping cow dung into city sewers and the Buddha Dariya. The civic body is scrambling to fix severe dirty water logging inside and outside the Hambran Road dairy complex, caused because wastewater inflows are completely overwhelming the local effluent treatment plant (ETP). While the ETP has a maximum processing capacity of 3.75 million liters per day (MLD), the volume of dairy waste currently being discharged far exceeds this limit.

To curb this excess wastewater, civic officials proposed capping water usage at 100 liters per animal daily and ordered dairy owners to install digital flow meters to track water consumption, suggesting a phased rollout starting with a few selected units. However, dairy owners strongly rejected the water cap. Paramjit Singh Bobby, chairman of the Haibowal Dairy Complex Association—which houses 28,000 cattle across 600 to 700 farms—argued that a single animal currently requires 120 liters of water just for drinking, plus additional water for washing, making the MC’s strict rationing impossible to implement.

Addressing the solid waste crisis, commissioner Gupta issued strict orders to the private contractor hired for waste management to ensure regular, uninterrupted lifting of cow dung from the complexes. She stated that senior civic officials are now monitoring ground-level operations daily. In response to the civic crackdown, dairy farmers defended themselves by questioning the administration’s selective enforcement, demanding to know why the civic body is acting tough on agriculture units while turning a blind eye to massive industrial factories illegally dumping chemical effluents into the same urban drains.