Cities laying rivers to waste

Rivers, seas and other water bodies in urban India are going to waste, with untreated water flowing into them like never before.

Updated on: Jan 6, 2010, 22:44:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Rivers, seas and other water bodies in urban India are going to waste, with untreated water flowing into them like never before.

Nearly 90 per cent of the liquid sewage — 38,254 million litres — generated daily by cities that flows into streams, rivers and sea doesn’t met environment norms. Water should be of bathing quality to meet the standard.

Water waste generated by cities, where 36 per cent of the country’s people live, is polluting over 70 per cent of the water sources, says a report released by the Central Pollution Control Board on Wednesday.

India can treat 11,500 million litres of waste water every day — 31 per cent of what is generated. Poor maintenance, however, leaves only 39 per cent of it up to the environment norms, the report, which lists data from 908 cities, says.

The problem is much bigger, as only 38 per cent of the population, 286 million people, in these cities has access to
sanitation facilities and 78 per cent to clean drinking water.

Once all get these facilities, waste water “will be our biggest environmental challenge”, board chairman S.P. Gautam said.

Urban sewage was extracting a huge ecological and public health cost because of increasing water pollution, he said.

The report, however, does not quantify the loss.

“The cities are polluting their future drinking water sources,” he warned.

Emerging cities such as Varanasi, Faridabad, Agra, Surat and Cochin have been identified as danger zones, generating 68 per cent of the total waste without any treating facility.

Only Hyderabad, Vadodara, Chennai, Ludhiana and Ahmedabad can treat all of their sewage. Delhi and Mumbai can treat over 90 per cent of it.

In the remaining 900 cities, the capacity varies from five to 60 per cent.

Planning Commission, in the 11th Plan, did admit to inadequacies in waste-water treatment, but seems to be falling short of giving money for it.

“We’re looking at different approaches… and STPs (sewage treatment plants) are one of them. We don’t want to repeat the mistake of providing money for STPs… fail to meet environment norms,” said a Plan panel official, requesting anonymity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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