In India, there are many industries which require huge quantities of water and can be termed as water intensive industries. Incidentally, these and many more industries are most water polluting industries and release large quantities of wastewaters creating pollution problems for the society in general. Since, environmental pollution control norms are getting stricter day by day, it is sensible to treat wastewaters not just to meet environmental norms for discharge, but to treat and make it amenable to reuse as process water in the same industry! This not only will reduce load on freshwater requirement drastically, but will also eliminate pollution significantly. In view of lack of information on cost-effective solutions, it is imperative that we devise sector specific solutions and/or further up-grade existing methodologies and equipment. Considering time consuming efforts in devising specific R & D solutions, a long term plan is required to formulate strategy for water recycle and reuse. Similar to that in western world and Japan, the Indian chemical and allied industry need to proactively take lead in working with the new technology that drives in several benefits to it and to the society. With this view we have established a group of scientists working on Industrial wastewater treatment, water recycle & reuse. This group at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune, will help to bring out the relevance of this approach in the chemical industry and its facets that would help to overcome several of long standing industrial and environmental issues. The activity mainly focuses on development of newer separation processes and how to combine or redefine finer aspects of existing methods- physico-chemical and biological methods. Specific aspects in developing wastewater treatment methodologies for effective separations are investigated using new/novel adsorbents, ion exchange processes, coagulation/ cavigulation/ solvent extraction, membrane separations and cavitation, in isolation and in combination. Emphasis is given to industrial applications and removal of pollutants in wastewater treatment to such an extent that reclaimed water can be recycled and reused. We have developed a technology based on hydrodynamic cavitation for treatment of industrial waste water (patent filed). This can prove to be a very useful technology for variety of effluent streams. Moreover, this technology can be combined with an array of other technologies like Fenton, ozone, wet air oxidation and so on for providing a very effective platform for solving variety of waste water treatment problems. We recently conducted a workshop entitled ‘Indus Water’ [Industrial waste water treatment, recycle and reuse [see http://induswater.ncl.res.in for more information]. We focus on these and other aspects to realize environmentally benign and globally competitive processes and technologies through our research and industrial work.