‘Groundwater near landfill sites highly contaminated’

If you are living near landfill sites in any of the 11 cities surveyed, the underground water is not fit for drinking, says a new government study released on Wednesday.

Updated on: Oct 27, 2010, 23:51:30 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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If you are living near landfill sites in any of the 11 cities surveyed, the underground water is not fit for drinking, says a new government study released on Wednesday.

Samples of underground water from near municipal landfill sites in cities such as Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Srinagar, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad have shown presence of contaminants, which can be harmful for humans.

“The study of borewells surrounding landfill sites indicates that there has been impact on the groundwater quality due to geogenic and anthropogenic reasons,” said the research paper of AB Akolkar and MK Choudhury, senior scientists with the Central Pollution Control Board.

The study is part of a compendium on research work on pollution released by former ISRO head Madhavan Nair.

The main source of ground water pollution from landfill sites is lechate, which is water that passes through decomposed waste heap. In absence of precaution to prevent lechate from percolating, the ground water gets contaminated. To find the impact of contamination, the samples were lifted from a distance up to two kilometers of the landfill site.

In Delhi, the CPCB team took samples from three sites in Gazipur, Okhla and Bhalswa.

While the total dissolved solids was found higher than permissible limits in all samples, heavy metals were found at different sites. Chromium was detected in groundwater of Gazipur dumping site and manganese at Bhalswa whereas these metals were found in less quantity at Okhla, the paper said.

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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