Dead river tales

The courts have stepped up pressure on governments to clean the country's rivers. The predictable response is to throw more money at the problem. That translates into more sewage treatment plants. Given that India's total sewage treatment capacity is under a fifth of what is needed, there is a lot of money to be spent""Rs 17,000 crore is one estimate for sewage treatment plants, to which must be added the money required for laying sewers and other lines. Politicians would be well advised, however, to study the example of Delhi carefully before embarking down this road, since Delhi has all the ingredients of a story gone wrong.

The capital city had a filthy river in the 1980s, when the courts began ordering a clean-up; it then spent over Rs 2,000 crore and created 40 per cent of the country's sewage treatment capacity for just this one city. Only, the river has got worse, much worse. In 1993, the BOD level (a measure of pollution) in the Yamuna was 130 tonnes a day; this rose to 276 tonnes a day by 2004 and, in February last year, the figure was 428 tonnes a day! No one can deny that sewage treatment plants are part of the solution but, as the Delhi example shows, just having these plants is no guarantee that the river will get cleaner, because bureaucratic bungling and thoughtlessness take over. A large number of Delhi's sewage treatment plants, for instance, are built in areas where there is no sewage. In areas where there is a lot of sewage, the capacity to treat it is limited. In some cases, the treated water is released in the same drains that are carrying untreated waste into the Yamuna, thereby negating the very purpose of the treatment.

Repeating the scale of investment that Delhi has seen on a nationwide canvas, even if this were feasible, is clearly no solution to the problem. Different approaches have to be tried, and simply importing technology from overseas is no guarantee of success. In one celebrated case on the Ganga, it was found some years ago that one of the imported technologies being favoured did not clean the faecal matter in the water (a big issue in India, with Yamuna levels as a case in point being 459,264 times the bathing water standards!) since it was developed to clean waste from vineyards, which didn't have any faecal matter to begin with. A more typical problem is that far too much water is used to flush the sewage down long pipes, along great distances. It should be obvious, therefore, that if local solutions which involve treating the sewage at the source are used, with the treated water used locally for gardening or washing cars, these would be more efficient. Right now, in Delhi, less than a third of treated wastewater is re-used.

Fixing these problems is not rocket science, but it does require some application of mind. More important, it requires seeing the problem in its totality, not as a bureaucratic project with a budget. River beautification projects the world over have generally resulted in beautiful waterfront property development that has even ended up creating good tourist potential. Incentives for using recycled water, and disincentives for using fresh water for purposes like gardening, have to be part of any model created for cleaning up the country's rivers. Perpetuating the current model based on multiplying sewage treatment plants is not going to help revive any of the country's dead and dying rivers. It will be, to use the cliche, more money down the drain.