A Study on Pragmatic Repercussions of CETP Towards MSMEs : A Boon or Drawback

Water intensive manufacturing enterprises implicates a specific modality of human-nature relations, in which resources are "extracted" from nature to meet the demands of humans and the effluents (wastewater) and wastes produced in this process are ‘dumped’ back into nature (sea, river, lake). For two decades, the common effluent treatment plant has become a silver lining in the cloud for water-intensive units of MSMEs as it comes with benefits of reducing effluent treatment costs, providing better collective treatment, and reducing land cost for small-scale industrial facilities that cannot afford individual treatment plants. CETP is considered a suitable inter- medium between MSMEs and water bodies to mitigate wastewater pollution. This paper strives to explore the pragmatic repercussions of CETP on MSMEs by the study of six CETP in operation at Ahmedabad industrial clusters. The effluents (wastewater drained out from CETP) data is analyzed to find the compliance pattern of CETPs with respect to standard norms and the legal action faced by MSMEs is studied to explore the possible pragmatic repercussions of this technology on MSMEs