The discharge of toxic effluents from various industries adversely affects water resources, soil fertility, aquatic organisms and ecosystem integrity and chronic adverse health effects. Additionally, with diminishing water resources due to rapid population growth and industrial development, reuse of municipal and industrial waste water after treatment and elimination of potential pollutants become more critical. Conventional treatment processes have inherent problems of safe disposal of sludge and additional carbon credits. Bioremediative strategies employing pure cultures of bacteria have been successfully applied for the biodegradation of toxic dye effluents. However consortial studies on this aspect are scarce. In the present study, decolorisation capacities of a pure culture vis-a vis bacterial consortia in defined and complex media have been studied with the view to establish their usefulness in bioremediation. The findings point to an increase in decolorisation by an order of magnitude of ten by soil consortia as compared to bacterial isolate, in defined media.

Keywords: Azo Dyes; Decolorisation;Textile Dyes; Bioremediation;