The Modi government has shown intent in cleaning up and conserving the river a with high budgetary allocation. but is it too little too late?
By Rashme Sehgal in Varanasi
Ganga, India’s holiest river, is the recipient of financial munificence from the NDA government. When the BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi said in May: “Ma Ganga aur Benaras se mera rishta purana hai,” little did the inhabitants of Varanasi realize how much the government’s purse strings would be opened to save the river. But Rs. 20,000 crore has already been spent on various clean-up projects of the river, with little to show for it.
Further, in this budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley set aside over Rs. 2,000 crore to help set up the Integrated Ganga Conser-vation Mission, called ‘Namai Gange’. Another `100 crore has been allocated for developing ghats and beautifying the riverfront in a slew of cities, including Kedarnath, Haridwar, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad and Patna. And under the Clean Ganga Mission, six new sewage treatment plants will come up in Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh), Beur, Karmali-chak and Saidpur (Bihar) and Budge Budge and Barrackpore (West Bengal) at a whopping cost of Rs. 1,058 crore.
Deadly cocktail
But would this amount be enough to clean the highly polluted and noxious river? Experts say it is just a drop in the ocean. According to a 2013 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report, the amount of sewage deposited in the river is 2,723 million liters per day (mld). Some experts claim it is actually 5,000 mld. Combine this with over 800 polluting industries—tanneries,
sugar, pulp, paper and chemicals—which spew toxic effluents into the river and what you get is a deadly cocktail of poison, stretching all the way from Gaumukh to the Bay of Bengal.
So, how will the Ganga be cleaned? Manoj Misra of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan along with other environmentalists put together five key points to help restore the river to its original glory. Misra says: “The river and sewer must never meet. Modi needs to ensure that water withdrawn from the river should never go back into it. Ganga’s tributaries need to be given equal importance.”
Environmental lawyer Ritwick Datta has called for the creation of a river regulation zone, along the lines of a coastal regulation zone, to help end encroachments along the river bank. Professor Vikram Soni of Jamia Millia Islamia says Modi needs to come up with a strong legislation to ensure that industrial units do not discharge effluents into the river. “Effluents must be brought to second recycling levels before flowing into the river,” he maintains.
Dr BD Tripathi, environmental scientist at the Benaras Hindu University (BHU) and a member of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, believes that efforts will bear fruit only if the river’s ecological flow is maintained. “But how can this be done when a huge quantum of water is being diverted for irrigation, thereby reducing the Ganga to a trickle? In Varanasi alone, a large numbers of houses and parks are being developed along the river bank—from Rajghat to Ramnager and up to Assi Ghat—reducing the width to half its size. Moreover, dams have reduced the water flow,” he laments.
Water fit for death
The water quality of the Ganga is extremely bad. Varanasi-based Dr Hemant Gupta, a gastroenterologist and endoscopist, revealed that patients are spending up to Rs. 15,000 a day on medicines but are still to be cured. “A number of diseases have been triggered off by drinking impure water. If this is not the equivalent of a super bug, then what is? But when I went public with this disclosure, medical authorities denied it,” he claims.
Gupta, along with Panchganga Found-ation, a group of Varanasi citizens working to revive the Ganga and its tributaries, tested the water recently at 18 ghats. The study threw up shocking impurity levels: the bacterial count at Shivala Ghat was 6.75 lakh/100 million liters, at Chowki Ghat it was 8.7 lakh/100 million liters, at Trilochan Ghat it was 8.5 lakh/ 100 million liters, while at Dasaswamedh Ghat it was 6.71 lakh/100 million liters. The scenario was worst at Kanpur, with bacterial levels in its ghats ranging from 12-14 lakh/100 million liters.
“The pathogenic micro-organisms found in the river included strains of aeromonas, salmonella and shigella sonnei. Other bacteria included E-coli, citrobacter, klebsiella, proteus, providential and enterobacter. These were even showing multi-drug resistance, a dangerous sign,” warns Gupta. These bacteria can cause various diseases, such as septicemia, meningitis, fever, kidney complications, to name a few.
Even the tributaries of the Ganga are polluted. Studies conducted by Pantnagar University highlight the rapid deterioration of ground and surface water in Ramganga and other tributaries after SEZs were set up in Udham Singh Nagar district after the formation of Uttarakhand.
Powerful lobbies
Col (retd) Pramod Sharma, who heads the ex-servicemen’s association in Udham Singh Nagar, claims: “Leading industrial houses, such as Tata, Ashok Leyland, Birlas and Bajaj have set up industries here. They have effluent treatment plants, but do not run them in order to maximize profits.
“A corrupt local bureaucracy has turned a blind eye to these goings-on, resulting in the steady deterioration of our water quality. Our organization consisting of ex-servicemen, farmers and children of freedom fighters is fighting for this cause but has little impact as strong lobbies work against us.”
Sadly, this is the sorry state of affairs all over India. A recent UN report ranked India’s water quality as 120th among 122 nations. If that was not damning enough, a World Resources Report warned that 70 per cent of India’s water supply was polluted by untreated sewage. Already, salinity, iron, fluoride and arsenic have adversely affected groundwater resources across 200 districts, and 18 major rivers are polluted. Water activist Rajinder Singh says: “The Ganga and Yamuna provide water to 700 million Indians, all of whom are reconciled to inadequate and incompetent management of our water resources.”
Attempts to cleanse the Ganga go back to the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Rs. 1,700 crore Ganga Action Plan. Many activists have been at the forefront to clean up the river, including Mahant Virbhadra Mishra, professor of hydraulics at BHU, and IIT professor GD Aggarwal, who even went on a fast-unto-death in 2013 to commit the government to
a cleanup.
“Has any person, official or engineer, been made accountable for the failure of the Ganga Action Plan? Crores of rupees have been poured into these schemes without any accountability,” points out Aggarwal.
It’s time this sacred river is accorded the respect it deserves.
‘Quacks, not doctors, spoiled Ganga project’
How should the Ganga be cleaned? That is the question vexing eight IITs, which have prepared a comprehensive Ganga River Basin Management Plan, and river engineers led by Professor UK Choudhary, the head of the MM Institute of Technology for Ganga Management. Opposed to the center’s decision to hand over the management of Ganga to IITs, Choudhary says his institute is better equipped. Excerpts from an interview with Rashme Sehgal:
Are Ganga’s problems intractable?
We have to understand the river in a holistic manner. It emanates from the Himalayas, which comprise largely of sedimentary rocks. These are inherently weak and only suitable for constructing micro-dams. Construction of large dams has seen a direct increase in landslides and I have been warning successive governments about this. Also, the larger the landslides, the more impure the water quality becomes.
Does that mean water in Tehri Dam, which provides drinking water to large parts of Uttarakhand and NCR, is not pure?
In Tehri Dam, the storage of dead water is 400 meters, while live storage is 200 meters. Water in the lower portion of the reservoir, which does not get circulated, is known as dead storage. Both organic and inorganic matter gets deposited here. The ions of these elements increase water density, resulting in contamination of the reservoir. This also causes a tremendous increase in pressure. This impure water creates major drinking water problems for villagers living downstream.
What is the relationship between large dams and landslides?
When the reservoir in large dams is full, voids in the rock are saturated with water. When water is released by the dam, water inside the pores comes out with increasing pressure. In the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, heavy landslides enhanced the drag forces, which in turn increased water velocity. Micro-dams are the right solution. They help generate 3,000 MW of electricity, apart from ensuring regular flow in the river.
So the situation in the river has been steadily deteriorating?
It is a dying river and we are to blame for it. BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) levels have gone up from 5-8 million liters in 1985 to the present 12-15 million liters and the oxygen content has come down from 7 million liters to 4 million liters.Not a single person from the river engineering side has been consulted regarding work being done on the Himalayan rivers. Rs. 20,000 crore has been spent on the Ganga project by people who are little more than quacks. IIT engineers only know how to deal with static water bodies as opposed to dynamic water bodies. River engineers understand the origins of a river, its function in the
mountains, why its quality is deteriorating…. They understand the kind of action and reaction that takes place between water, rocks and air; how atmosphere, temperature and pressure along with rainfall are getting affected by dams. The environmental conditions in these areas have been altered and yet, none of the reports brought out by IITs highlight these factors.
We are presently withdrawing 10,400 cumex (cubic feet per second) of water from the river. While 6,200 cumex is being
withdrawn from the western Ganga, 420 cumex of drinking water is being supplied to Delhi. When I was a member of the Tehri Dam committee, I had expressed my reservations about water being carried such long distances to the capital. If water levels keep decreasing, the Ganga will never be cleaned or rejuvenated. The river needs a minimum level of velocity, but if this keeps declining, pollution levels will keep increasing. Less velocity means more meandering and more sedimentation and erosion.
What about sewage treatment plants (STPs) and industrial effluents?
The STPs in Varanasi are not properly located. They should have been on the sand bed side, which is the convex side. But they’re on the concave side, which is where villages and towns are located. The convex side is the north, south and east of Varanasi and total pollution levels could have been transferred using the law of gravity. I had proposed the theory of three gradients way back in 1995. But it was rejected by the Central Pollution Control Board because they claimed it would choke the sand bed. But the sand bed is permeable. If you do not understand river dynamics, all your attempts are simply going to go down the drain.
Are you happy with the Rs. 2000 crore allocated for Ganga cleaning by the Modi government?
They first need to change their technological inputs. They need to develop smaller dams with a height of 4-5 feet so that there is no deterioration in water quality. These dams can be built at a distance of 100-kilometer intervals. If you build three such barrages, you have still ensured a flow of 70 percent as opposed to the 5 percent flow today. Your irrigation potential remains the same and the river flow is also constant. Unless experts are brought in to provide expertise, there will be no river left in the years to come.