Access to safe drinking water is one of the greatest challenges of 21st century, especially due to increased urbanization, industrialization, pollution, water scarcity/limited availability and changing climatic conditions. antimicrobial resistance (amr) is becoming a global crisis, threatening the future of drugs and also millions of lives worldwide. many resources of water are faecally contaminated, resulting nearly half million diarrhoeal deaths each year, including children below 5-year age. apart from faecal contaminants, different enteric viruses like norovirus, calcivirus, cyanobacteria and algae also cause serious health problem. thus, disinfection of water is most critical issue for healthy life, especially for the developing countries. water disinfection also demands complete destruction or removal/ of pathogenic microorganisms from drinking water/raw water/ground water to prevent recontamination of water in distribution system and maintain safest quality of water. in recent years, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics are causing concerns worldwide. presence of antibiotic resistant bacteria has been reported in untreated drinking water sources such as wells, rivers, and lakes and also in presumably safe water such as in tap/bottled water. according to who report, overuse and misuse of antibiotics in human and animal health is considered to be the main cause for accelerating the emergence and spread of amr bacteria. however, disinfection studies pertaining to amr bacteria such as methicillin resistance staphylococcus aureus (mrsa) and also difficult, opportunistic pathogen such as pseudomonas aeruginosa have been sparsely researched, probably due to difficulty in its removal. so, there is urgent need for techno-economically feasible methodologies for destroying these and for mitigating the proliferation of amr bacteria in drinking water systems. the present invention is for the first time, a new and techno-economic strategy for effective removal of amr and difficult, opportunistic pathogen using cavitation and natural oils/plant extract. a hybrid methodology using natural oils of known health benefits has been utilized in combination with conventional physico-chemical method of hydrodynamic cavitation. the nature of oil modifies the cavitation behaviour, it can be perceived as biocatalysts and an order of magnitude enhancement in the cavitation rate by 3 to 4 times. it is not only providing efficient and effective water disinfection, but also eliminates harmful effects of conventional methods such as formation of disinfection by-products apart from reducing cost of treatment. a proof-of concept is demonstrated by achieving exceptionally high rates for practically complete removal of amr and relatively less researched, gram-negative opportunistic pathogen, pseudomonas aeruginosa and gram-positive mrsa using a natural oil-peppermint oil and two different cavitating reactors employing vortex flow (vortex diode) and linear flow (orifice) for hydrodynamic cavitation. it observed that greater than 99% disinfection could be obtained, typically in less than 10 min, using vortex diode with operating pressure drop of 1 bar and low dose of 0.1% peppermint oil as an additive, depicting very high rates of disinfection. the rate of disinfection can be further increased by using simple aeration which can result in significant lowering of oil dose. the conventional device, orifice requires relatively higher pressure drop of 2 bar and comparatively more time (~20 min) for disinfection. the vortex diode requires significantly lower pressures, 50% lower as compared to orifice for the similar extent of disinfection. the cost of the disinfection was also found to be significantly lower compared to most conventional processes indicating techno-economic feasibility in employing the developed hybrid method of disinfection for effectively eliminating bacteria including amr bacteria from water. the developed approach not only highlights importance of going back to nature for not just conventional water disinfection, but also for eliminating hazardous amr bacteria and may also find utility in many other applications for the removal of antimicrobial bacteria.