Over the past decade, Hyderabad has often been regarded as one of India’s better-performing cities in terms of public governance.
However, between 2025 and 2026, water quality assessments conducted by multiple academic and research institutions—including NEERI, MANUU and NIT—reported significant contamination in four of the city’s six major drinking water sources, which collectively supply nearly 80% of Hyderabad’s municipal water. According to The Times of India, the detected pollutants included industrial chemical discharges, agricultural runoff, and microbial contamination such as coliform bacteria, indicating a complex composite pollution profile.
The assessed water sources included Osmansagar, Himayatsagar as well as the Godavari and Krishna river systems. The MANUU research team classified Osmansagar’s Water Quality Index as “Very Poor,” with elevated concentrations of heavy metals and microbial indicators. Meanwhile, a joint study by NEERI and IIT Hyderabad linked pollution in the Godavari basin to upstream pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing discharge. Experts warned that such contamination patterns may increase the risk of diarrheal outbreaks and other waterborne diseases.
The identified pollution sources exhibit a typical urban–industrial overlay, including domestic sewage, agricultural pesticide residues, industrial effluents, and landfill leachate. Pollutants span from traditional microbial and suspended solids to heavy metals, organic compounds, and pharmaceutical molecules, creating new challenges for municipal water treatment.
Hyderabad’s water authority responded that contamination risks are being managed at the treatment stage through chlorination, multi-layer filtration, and routine monitoring of approximately 5,000 water samples per day. While these conventional treatment processes effectively address microbial risks, their efficiency remains limited for industrial organic compounds, dissolved salts (TDS), heavy metals, and pharmaceutical residues. Multiple studies have recommended that cities adopt more advanced treatment technologies—such as biochemical treatment, adsorption systems, and membrane separation—to cope with increasing water quality complexity.
Importantly, the responsibility of municipal water plants is to maintain basic drinking water safety, not to ensure uniform sensory quality at point-of-use. For households, perceived impacts are often reflected in taste, odor, scaling, residual chlorine by-products, or—in more extreme cases—chemical residues. In addition, aging distribution networks introduce secondary risks such as leakage, corrosion, and backflow contamination, a phenomenon observed in many major cities worldwide.
Within modern water treatment pathways, reverse osmosis (RO) has become widely deployed across seawater and brackish desalination, industrial wastewater reuse, municipal deep treatment, and domestic drinking applications due to its ability to remove dissolved salts (TDS), heavy metals, pesticides, microorganisms, and industrial organic pollutants. Many cities are gradually transitioning toward a dual-path approach that combines centralized treatment with point-of-use precision treatment to enhance supply consistency and controllability.
HJC’s RO membrane technologies are currently applied across seawater desalination, industrial reuse, municipal drinking water, and domestic purification systems. Each segment exhibits distinct performance requirements: industrial systems prioritize high salinity tolerance and continuous operation; municipal applications emphasize stability and water quality consistency; and domestic systems focus on taste, safety, and handling of residual chlorine by-products.
As water quality challenges become more complex, both cities and end users are increasingly supplementing treatment infrastructure with precision purification technologies across different consumption points. HJC will continue monitoring global water quality developments while providing membrane separation solutions for relevant application environments.