 "Yamuna")
Citizens of Delhi-NCR are coming together to breathe life back into the ailing Yamuna.
A group of concerned citizens is rallying thousands of people to form a 22-kilometre human chain on the banks of the Yamuna on June 4 to draw the attention of the authorities concerned to the sorry state of the river, which is plagued by pollution and degradation.
The chain will extend from Wazirabad to Okhla in Delhi, a 22-kilometre stretch that accounts for 75 per cent of the river's pollution load. Twenty-two drains fall into the river in this stretch.
This will probably be the biggest such effort to sensitise the people of Delhi and ensure their participation in cleaning the Yamuna, said the members of the "Yamuna Sansad", a campaign launched by environmentalists, conservationists, academicians and researchers working to revive the river.
Experts say untapped waste water from unauthorised colonies and jhuggi-jhopri clusters, and the poor quality of the treated waste water discharged from sewage treatment plants (STPs) and common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) is the main reason behind the high pollution levels in the river.
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The river can be considered fit for bathing if the biological oxygen demand is less than three milligram per litre and dissolved oxygen is greater than five milligram per litre.
"At 6.30 am on June 4, a 22-kilometre-long human chain will be formed on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi. Around one lakh people will stand hand in hand between Wazirabad and Kalindi, pledging to keep the river clean. The purpose is to sensitise people to work in this direction," said K N Govindacharya, former general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a member of the Yamuna Sansad.
Ravishankar Tiwari, the coordinator of the Yamuna Sansad, said it will probably be the biggest campaign so far to sensitise the people of Delhi about the current state of the Yamuna.
The Yamuna Sansad will remain active until the river becomes pure, Tiwari said.
He added that the campaign has garnered the support of political parties.
The campaign calls for a removal of encroachments on the river floodplains, improving the sewer network and STPs in the capital, stopping the direct discharge of industrial effluent into the river in Haryana and Delhi, developing biodiversity parks on the floodplains, ensuring environmental flow and making the polluters pay.
Delhi generates around 770 million gallons a day (MGD) of sewage. The 35 STPs located at 20 locations across the city can treat up to 630 MGD of sewage and have been utilising around 85 per cent of their capacity. The rest of the untreated sewage falls into the river directly.
Government data shows that only 10 of the 35 operational STPs in the capital meet the prescribed standards for waste water (BOD and TSS less than 10 mg per litre). Together, they can treat 150 million gallons of waste water a day.
According to the city government's Outcome Budget, 29 per cent of the sewage generated in Delhi in 2021-22 fell into the Yamuna untreated. It was 28 per cent in 2019-20 and 26 per cent in 2020-21.
The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) is upgrading and rehabilitating the existing STPs to be able to meet the prescribed norms and reduce the pollution load in the Yamuna.
However, several projects have been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an air pollution-related construction ban and a delay in land allotment and tree-cutting permissions.
Sewer networks have been laid in just 747 of the 1,799 unauthorised colonies in Delhi.
Multiple reports submitted by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) to the Union Jal Shakti Ministry have highlighted that the river cannot be fit for bathing in the absence of a minimum environmental flow -- the minimum quantity of water flow that a river must have in order to preserve its ecosystems and meet the bathing standards.
A study conducted by the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee had in 2019 recommended that 23 cubic metre per second (cumec) water (437 million gallons a day) be released in the river from the Hathnikund barrage in Haryana's Yamuna Nagar district in the lean season for sustaining the downstream ecosystems.
At present, only 10 cumecs (190 MGD) of water is released from the barrage. A gap of 13 cumecs (247 MGD) remains.
According to the ministry, the water sharing agreement of 1994 among the riparian states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi is due for revision only in 2025.
According to the DPCC, an e-flow of 23 cumecs will bring down the level of biological oxygen demand from 25 milligram per litre to 12 milligram per litre and other steps that are being taken will bring it down further.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
