Maharashtra plans recycled water, desalination network for data-centre boom
MIDC is planning nearly 180 km of water infrastructure to serve four data-centre clusters in the Mumbai region, using treated sewage where possible and seawater where it is not
MIDC's assessment identifies around 628 MLD of secondary-treated wastewater from sewage treatment plants in the region as potentially available for reuse.
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Maharashtra is planning a large water supply network for its growing data-centre industry, combining treated sewage and desalinated seawater to meet the needs of four proposed data-centre clusters in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
Documents reviewed by CarbonCopy show that the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) is considering building nearly 180 km of dedicated water pipelines, along with new treatment and desalination capacity, as it tries to secure water for an industry that is expanding rapidly in the state. It is also India's first state working on a greywater policy for data-centre clusters.
The plan offers a look at how Maharashtra is trying to deal with a question that is becoming harder to ignore as data centres get larger: where will the water come from?
Meeting growing needs
For the TTC Navi Mumbai and Taloja data-centre clusters, MIDC proposes to take secondary-treated wastewater from municipal sewage treatment plants (STP), and treat it further for supplying data centres.
The two clusters are estimated to need about 586 million litres per day (MLD). MIDC's assessment identifies around 628 MLD of secondary-treated wastewater from sewage treatment plants in the region as potentially available for reuse.
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The proposed network would stretch for about 97 km, with roughly 45 km serving TTC and Mahape and another 52 km serving Taloja and Additional Taloja.
MIDC has asked the City And Industrial Development Corporation Of Maharashtra (CIDCO) to provide space for 1,500-mm treated-water pipelines inside both tunnels of the proposed Kharghar-Turbhe Link Road project. The technical note says this would be the most technically and economically feasible way to connect the network.
The more unusual part of the plan comes further out.
For the proposed Mumbai 3.0 and Khalapur data-centre clusters, MIDC says conventional water and wastewater sources are not available. It is therefore proposing two seawater reverse-osmosis plants of 150 MLD each, giving a combined capacity of 300 MLD against an estimated requirement of 288 MLD.
Another 80 km of transmission mains would be needed to move that water.
Taken together, the four clusters have about 4,834 acres earmarked for data-centre development, with a potential capacity of about 21.5 GW and estimated water demand of around 874 MLD.
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Local concerns and solutions
The scale matters because India's data-centre industry is moving towards much larger facilities. CarbonCopy's analysis in July found that operators are increasingly looking at hundreds of megawatts and, in some cases, gigawatt-scale campuses. At that scale, securing land, power and water becomes part of the infrastructure challenge, rather than a matter left to individual facilities.
Water availability is particularly complicated because national consumption figures can hide local shortages. CarbonCopy's earlier reporting found that while data-centre water use is small compared with agriculture at the national level, the picture changes when facilities are located in water-stressed regions.
Maharashtra's approach is to deal with that problem at the infrastructure level.
Its second document describes a system in which municipal corporations would continue treating sewage at their STPs. But instead of sending all of the secondary-treated water for disposal, they could supply it to MIDC, which would then carry out further treatment and sell the reclaimed water to data centres and other industries. The document also suggests sharing some of the revenue with the municipal bodies supplying the wastewater.
The approach fits with Maharashtra's 2025 policy on reuse of treated wastewater, which identifies industrial cooling and data centres among the possible uses for treated sewage. The MIDC document says it has begun coordinating with urban local bodies and other government agencies over the availability and allocation of wastewater.
But the numbers in the documents are still preliminary.
MIDC says the next stage is to validate the commitments from individual STPs, the availability of pipeline corridors, treatment requirements and the project's phasing before moving towards detailed design and approvals.
One important question is what “available” wastewater means in practice. The assessment identifies 628 MLD for TTC and Taloja, but the documents do not establish how much of that volume has actually been committed by the municipal bodies, or how much represents spare capacity at the STPs.
There is also a further treatment question. MIDC proposes technologies including ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis, but the documents do not specify the recovery rate of these systems or how much reject water they would generate.
Those details will matter when the state moves from a concept to an actual project. Reusing sewage can reduce the need to draw freshwater, but desalination brings its own energy requirements, while advanced wastewater treatment also consumes energy and produces concentrated waste streams.
For now, the documents show something more basic: Maharashtra is not leaving water supply entirely to individual data-centre operators. It is beginning to plan the water system around the industry itself, with sewage treatment plants, pipelines and desalination plants built into the picture.
[Additional inputs: Shreya Jai, Bhasker Tripathi]