The Laughing Waters community is one of the oldest planned/gated communities in Whitefield, Bangalore. However, for most of the last 20 years the plots remained mostly vacant. Recently many homes have been built (including 3 apt buildings) and there has been much stress on the original water and sewage systems.

The current water tower has a capacity of 300,000 liters approximately. It is filled up every other day and the residents get water for a couple of hours. Each home has put in tanks that fill up and thus supply water inside the home. There is quite a bit of leakage, however, it is hard to measure.

The plan called for 4 sewage treatment plants (STP) and one was constructed. Due to being volunteer run, the association was unable to continue the original project to completion. The costs for completing the other 3 have gone up and the residents are raising funds.

Originally there was one borewell and a second one was installed a greater depth. The first one is showing signs of drying up and there is a plan to put in a 3rd.

There is 2 acres of common area which are watered with borewell water. The residents are hoping to use grey water to water all the common areas and thus save precious ground water.

In addition, consumption needs to be measured and then maybe a plan to have a pay-for-use system.

The Decentralized Treatment Systems (DTS) design for the entire STP project is attached.

DTS applications are based on the principles of making maximum use of natural gifts like gravity, 
microbiological activity or temperature. This result in a system which can work without technical 
energy input (in fact it’s producing energy in form of methane/biogas) and needs only minimal 
maintenance. DTS application provides state of the art technology at affordable prices because 
material/inputs used for construction are locally available. 

The water system enhancements include:

1. Grey water recovery: piping the grey water from the completed STP-1 back to the common area, putting a storage tank and then using the water for irrigation.

2. Fixing leaks: replacing old pipes with new galvanized iron (GI) pipes (or PVC pipes) or a thinner diameter.

3. Additional borewell and designing the piping an storage.

This project is divided into many projects and phases:

1. STP project: 3 STPs need to built in a parallel phased plan

2. Grey water recovery - independent

3. Leak fixing - independent

4. Metering - independent

The community is in complete agreement on the sewage issue. There are many people concerned about water usage and conservation and all are concerned about quantity and quality of water and provision of handling sewage.

Tree planting is related to greening the community and recharging the groundwater. The children of LW have formed a group - EcoLife and have started planting trees along the roads and plan to plant trees in the vacant lots.

A committee was formed to raise the funds. Another committee has been formed to oversee the project.

The idea is to also share with the global community everything about this project: from the design to the selection of contractors, ... This community is happy to share its learnings and to learn from others too.