Every year, on June 5, the world remembers and celebrates the concern for environment in the form of the World Environment Day. But why are we not getting the practice of managing our environment right? Why is it that our rivers are still so polluted and getting worse, even as the government allocates money for river conservation? The problem is that we still do not have the formula for cleaning our rivers the right way.
Take Delhi and its river tale: Delhi has already spent a huge amount on cleaning the small stretch of the Yamuna, which flows through the city. Some Rs 1,500 crore — which is possibly the highest amount in the country, if not the world — has been spent on “cleaning” this 22 km stretch of the river. But, all this has meant little. The city spends and will spend much more. But, it’s just money down the drain as pollution only increases. The river, by all pollution parameters, is dead. It just has not been officially cremated.
The answers exist. But these will first require us to relearn pollution in the rich cities of poor India. It is then that we will understand the answer doesn’t lie in building more sewage treatment capacity or more drains and repairing even more drains to clean the river. Just think. Delhi has already got 17 sewage treatment plants, which together add up to 40 per cent of the total installed sewage treatment capacity in India. But, the fact is that these plants remain grossly under-utilised.
Why? Because the city does not have drainage to convey all human waste to the sewage treatment plants. It is expensive to build sewage drainage, but it is even more expensive to maintain it. Today, the bulk of the city — remember, it has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country — is not connected to underground drainage. And the government lags behind in all its plans to build more. It also finds that it can never repair enough. The end result is that where there is a sewage treatment plant, there is no waste to treat.
But that is only one part of the story. What’s even worse is that we forget that the majority of Delhi lives unconnected to underground drainage or lives in what we call unauthorised and illegal colonies. We forget that these areas have sewage, and that this flows into open drains criss-crossing the city. These are the same drains flowing past colonies in which the sewage treatment plants dispose of their treated effluent.
So think. In this pollution scheme, the illegal unconnected waste of the majority is being mixed with the treated waste of the minority. The result is obvious: Growing pollution in the river. We can never clean the Yamuna until we can treat the sewage of all in the city.
But this will require providing a drainage system and sewage treatment for everyone. For this, the economics of this waste matter is important to grasp. We have to first pay for the water we use and then for the waste that we generate. This is because the more water we use in our houses, the more waste we discharge.
But it is not just the cost that we need to pay. The fact is that all governments (including that of Delhi) are designing systems that we cannot pay for. These are unaffordable systems to pipe water across long distances, which adds to the cost of distribution and worse, increases water loss. Then, we design to take back the waste and pump it and pipe it even longer distances. The cost of electricity for pumping and, even more, the exorbitant cost of first building and then maintaining the infrastructure mean that nothing really changes. This is why we have to relearn the science and the art of river cleaning. This is why business as usual will not result in a clean river.
The political economy of defecation is that the government (in this case, the rich Delhi government) does not charge for the water it supplies, forget the waste it collects or treats. We, the relatively rich users of this system of underground drainage, are then subsidised. But, this also means that the government does not have money to pay to build, or run, or repair the system for all. This is the political economy of defecation where the rich are subsidised, in the name of the poor. This is the real excreta of progress that we must understand. Nothing less than this will clean the river. We need to be clear on this on the World Environment Day this year. This is the real business that we need to fix.
