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Clean water now a business, says former NGT chief
Swatanter Kumar was speaking on the topic ‘Right to clean water - A myth or reality’ at the Global Law Conference being held at Chandigarh University, Gharuan
Former chairperson of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) justice Swatanter Kumar on Saturday said that getting clean water had become a business affair now.
Swatanter Kumar was speaking on the topic ‘Right to clean water - A myth or reality’ at the Global Law Conference being held at Chandigarh University, Gharuan. The two-day conference will conclude on Sunday.
“We are now selling water and have made it a business,” he said, stressing on how different companies had started producing water as a commodity. “Clean water should have been made available to everyone for free,” he said.
Hinting at a global clean water crisis in near future, Kumar, has also served as a judge in the Supreme Court of India, said, “Chandigarh and Shimla are already facing water woes and recently too, for 10 days Shimla was under a major water crisis.”
Justice Rekha Palli of the High Court of Delhi said clean water is the need of the hour. “Right to clean water is a basic right. Nearly 60% of clean water has been depleted in the last decade because of various reasons. We need to save it as our agriculture totally depends on it,” she said.
Palli said, “The Central Pollution Control Board has also said that the pollution of our rivers has doubled in the last one year.” She said there are many policies related to saving water: “But nothing is being implemented on the ground,” she said, adding “participation of the youth can bring a change”.
Justice Anand Mohan of the Supreme Court of Nepal said clean water is both a myth and our right. “People are vacating the higher reaches, especially in the Himalayas, and migrating to the plains for water,” he said.
A civil engineer with the Punjab Pollution Control Board, Sandeep, opened his talk saying the government and bureaucrats were doing little to overcome the problem. “Untreated sewage is openly discharged into the rivers,” he said.
A professor at the Institute of Water and Flood Management, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), A K M Saiful Islam, delivered a presentation explaining how aquatic life was being affected due to polluted water.
CU TO INCLUDE ENVIRONMENT AS COMPULSORY SUBJECT
Former National Green Tribunal head and Supreme Court justice (retired) Swatanter Kumar, who is also the head of the advisory board of Chandigarh University, announced that the varsity will introduce environment as a compulsory subject in all the courses offered.
Kumar said in the next one month, all 25,000 students of the varsity will walk to Chandigarh collecting and segregating waste on the way.
