Noted water conservationist Rajendra Singh, also known as 'Waterman of India', today announced his maiden intervention to rejuvenate polluted rivers in the urban areas of the country.
Singh will launch the campaign from the Dahisar river in northwest Mumbai with a 5 km 'river march' on Sunday. He said more such marches have been planned in other cities in India.
The 14-km long Dahisar river, which passes through densely-populated pockets of Borivali and Dahisar in northwestern suburbs, has been badly impacted over the years due to different kinds of pollution.
Some of the biggest pollutants of the river are the untreated discharge from an illegal 'dhobi ghat', many cowsheds, a crematorium and unplanned slum areas through which the river passes, experts say.
Singh, who is credited with reviving rivers in his home state of Rajasthan and was conferred the Stockholm Water Prize for his work in 2015, said the aim of this campaign is to rejuvenate urban rivers by taking appropriate actions.
"It's important that all living beings should lead a stress-free life and have access to clean water in its natural form. River rejuvenation work is, therefore, the biggest challenge before all of us and specially for urban citizens," Singh told PTI here today.
The winner of 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership rued that almost all the rivers in the country are "biologically dead" because of the activities which happen in their catchment areas and that they are now affecting all living beings, mostly the people living near it.
This two-year campaign is aimed at restoring the river to what it should be through this campaign, he said.
Deputy Director of the Maharashtra Nature Park Society, Avinash Kubal, explains that as the Dahisar river exits the protected area of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, it faces the wrath of the washers, who discharge detergents and other chemicals into the river.
Not just that, close to two dozen cowsheds, home to over 2,000 livestock, release dung and other waste into the river and then it passes through the area, where sanitation and waste water disposal systems are not working effectively, further compounding the problem.
The situation is very grave and posing health hazards for
the people living nearby, Kubal said.
"Generally, even the river, which gets polluted, will get purified naturally by the impact and actions of elements like biota in the riverbed. But in case of almost all the rivers in our cities this is not happening and as a result the river once polluted always remains polluted," he said.
Volunteers have worked for over last two years, collecting data on what ails the river system and have found that there is unbearable stench in many quarters because of the lethal gases getting released from the polluted waters.
Also, majority of the stretches of the Dahisar river are a breeding ground of mosquitoes, resulting in health-related worries.
There are as many as 19 educational institutions in the vicinity of the river and students suffer the bad stench when they are at their classes, Kubal said.
A meeting of 18 different stakeholder groups was held here under the chairmanship of Singh on January 29 to discuss the way ahead. Solutions like setting up an affluent treatment plant for the dhobi ghat area, biogas plants near cowsheds and correcting the sewage systems for shanties were also decided. All these can be done at a very minimal cost.
Students from over 10 different colleges, including Somaiya College, MD College, have come together and are working for different aspects of sustainable river rejuvenation for Dahisar river, Kubal said.
He said the government and the people are working together on the project and help will also be taken from corporates, which have evinced interest in supporting the scheme under their CSR initiatives.
