With the shortage of water becoming a major problem in the southern part of India as potable demand rises, industries are being asked to conserve or reduce their consumption of municipal water. Faced with these problems, Madras Fertilisers Ltd. looked to the re-use of water as a possible solution to limiting their consumption of fresh water, using the adjacent city effluent as a feed stock. Madras Fertilisers asked Nuchem Weir, a Weir Westgarth-Nuchem Plastics India joint venture company, to produce a plant using a reverse osmosis based process to convert 3.3 Imgd of effluent to 2.7 Imgd of usable industrial grade water suitable for feeding their cooling towers, releasing 2.7 Imgd of fresh water for distribution to the population of Madras. To comply with Indian regulations, the reject water is piped 7 km to the sea for discharge so that local natural water supplies are not further contaminated. The paper discusses the process considerations and the problems of engineering design and implementation in India where local content must be maximised to conserve foreign currency.