Barun Roy: Sewage canals called rivers

ASIA FILE

A whopping Rs 1,188 crore has been spent on cleaning up the Yamuna in Delhi, yet the river has only got dirtier.

Every year after Durga Puja, loud and anxious concerns are expressed "" this year Kolkata's mayor added his "" about polluting the Hooghly River and the need to do something to stop it. Yet, every year thousands of images continue to be dumped in the river. There's an effort to clean up, but only the scaffoldings are retrieved for later re-use. The effigies of the idols are left to rot, as are tonnes of flowers, green coconuts, bael and banana leaves, and other appendages of the ritual. The mud that shapes the images is loosened into sediment. The toxic pigments and varnishes used to paint the images dissolve to do what they are supposed to do: contaminate the water.

Of course, this brutal annual assault isn't the only cause of the Hooghly's decay. But it certainly is the most visible, yet all we do is talk, and so far, our concerns have led us nowhere. The Hooghly continues to suffocate from its heavy silt loads, untreated sewage and effluents disgorged from the many industries that flourish on both its banks, and other pollutants like body and domestic wastes that we discharge into it every day. Water quality is dismal and the coli count is high.

How much respect do we have for our holy rivers? One of the TV channels showed scenes of the immersion of Durga images in the Yamuna in Delhi. It wasn't the images that caught my attention. What did was a very unusual spread of a white, frothy substance that covered the entire water surface along the shore. Then it dawned on me that I was actually watching the death throes of a river that the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) describes as the "sewage canal." There couldn't be a better description. But the thing is no head hangs in shame that one of India's most sacred rivers, flowing past the capital of a country that's hallowed by history and becoming an economic powerhouse, has been reduced to a stinking drain.

According to the CSE, a whopping Rs 1,188 crore has been spent on cleaning up the Yamuna in Delhi, yet the river has only got dirtier. The water isn't fit for bathing even after treatment and the pollution level shows no sign of abating. In other words, the entire money has literally gone down the drain. Now, there's a fresh proposal to spend Rs 4,000 crore more under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, and if history is any guide in this hallowed "" hollowed? "" land, one can predict what's going to happen to that project too.

The main Ganga itself is in a sorrier state. Despite 22 years of the Ganga Action Plan and some Rs 1,500 crore spent to implement it, the river remains heavily polluted from industrial effluents, domestic wastes, remnants of religious ceremonies and rituals, biological discharges, and even half-burnt human bodies. A recent report claims nearly 1.7 billion litres of liquid waste go into the Ganga every day and at many places the water is unfit even for agricultural use. Its flood plains have all but gone and its silt loads have nowhere to settle but on its bed.

Of course, rivers aren't dying in India alone. China, in particular, is heavily threatened. The Pearl River reportedly dumps more than 133,000 tonnes of waste every year into the sea. The Yangtze is even more polluted. The Yellow River recently turned red from wastewater discharged from a heating station in Lanzhou. But if China has a problem on its hand, it cares to look for a solution. If the government has allocated $20 billion under its 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) to improve sewage disposal, one can be sure there will be results. New sewage standards are being set. Mandatory targets are being introduced to reduce chemical oxygen demand discharges. The Asian Development Bank is helping to design market-based mechanisms to combat water pollution.

I wish I could say the same thing about India and repose the same amount of trust in its political will. Unfortunately, our river-cleaning programmes never work. We spend large sums of money, too, to fight pollution, but there's no result.

Malaysia recently reported that only seven of its 146 river basins were categorised as polluted in 2006, against 15 the year before, and 14 of all its rivers were so clean that their water was safe even to drink. Indian rivers never come back to life. They only deteriorate. And it's not difficult to understand why. If rivers, or anything for that matter, were ever to improve in India, the justification to spend "" and make "" more money, year after year, would disappear. The great Indian development machine would then grind to a halt because it's designed to work only in a state of chaos, confusion, unfinished targets, and perennial underdevelopment.