Rivers of filth

Thirty- one per cent of Indian rivers and water bodies contain an alarming level of bacterial contamination, according to an analysis of the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB), reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 18, 2008, 02:28:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Thirty- one per cent of Indian rivers and water bodies contain an alarming level of bacterial contamination, according to an analysis of the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB), which monitors water quality at 1,245 locations in the country.

The analysis said the quality of water of the rivers like the Yamuna in Delhi and western Uttar Pradesh, the Ganga in Kanpur, the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad and the Satluj in Punjab was not fit for human consumption.

Coming only a few days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the Ganga as India’s national river, the watchdog blamed India’s urban centres for pollution. It said municipal corporations were not able to treat the increasing load of the sewage flowing into rivers.

In Delhi, more than half the city’s sewage flows into the Yamuna without adequate treatment, turning the Yamuna into the country’s most bacteria contaminated river. Urban sewage is also a major cause of the pollution of the Sabarmati and the Hindon near Ghaziabad and Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

A Planning Commission report on wastewater management said only 30 per cent of the wastewater released into Indian rivers and lakes was treated.

The CPCB said organic pollution indicators, the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and the chemical oxygen demand (COD), were found to be considerably high near large urban centres due to the discharge of partly treated or untreated wastewater.

However, the CPCB found that the overall water quality had slightly improved during the last decade, but the pathogenic (bacterial) pollution level was still rising. Pathogenic pollution is the major cause for water-borne diseases, which kill more than four lakh children every year in India.

In 66 per cent of the monitoring centres, the total coliform — a bacterial pollution indicator — increased from 53 per cent in 2006 from as low as 48 per cent in 1999.

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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