Ajay Rawat is a Junior Engineer with the Urban Development Department in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. After completing his diploma in 2012, he worked in the private sector for four years before joining the Government of Uttarakhand in 2016. What started as a routine posting for him landed him on his most meaningful project yet.
When Ajay took on a major water supply, sewerage, and wastewater treatment project near the Suswa River, he encountered multiple hurdles from the very beginning. Land acquisition proved difficult due to citizens’ apprehension towards having a treatment facility in the locality along with added challenges of building a treatment plant in disaster prone area, requiring multiple community interactions to successfully commence the project.
However, rather than pushing back against this resistance, Ajay has effectively worked through communication and dialogue. He spent months engaging with residents, explaining why the project mattered, building understanding, and gaining people’s trust. On the technical side, Ajay navigated design challenges carefully, ensuring structural safety and worker protection.
What stood out is how Ajay and his team have worked towards sewerage connectivity where they combined GIS mapping with household-level data collection. By mapping sewerage networks alongside collecting data from each household, they could accurately predict capacity needs, calculate applicable charges, and plan for future expansions. This granular approach meant the system would be designed not just for today, but for the community's growth tomorrow. The proposed facility project was groundbreaking, a first-of-its-kind double-story STP facility in Uttarakhand. While working on the project, Ajay proactively manages day-to-day training and capacity building sessions for the workforce at the site educating them about safety standards and engaging with the community through continued interactions.
The impact would be substantial. The facility will serve approximately 7,000 people in Ward 83 with residents gaining reliable access to water and sewerage services, relieving families. More importantly, Ajay sees this project as a holistic intervention through the lens of national priorities like the Swachh Bharat Mission & National Mission for Clean Ganga. The treatment facility also caters to reuse treated wastewater for landscaping purposes instead of being discharged into rivers.
As the project is now nearing completion with final installations underway. Ajay hopes to operationalize it within the coming 5 months. As he reflects on this journey, Ajay remains inspired by a simple belief that thoughtful engineering, combined with community trust and environmental responsibility, is what turns growth into development. For Dehradun and beyond, his work is a quiet reminder that development works best when it listens first and builds later.