Amid pilgrim rush, Uttarakhand faces littering concerns
The higher reaches of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand are littered with garbage that lakhs of pilgrims throw while on the Char Dham pilgrimage, creating a new ecological danger, experts and activists said.
The higher reaches of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand are littered with garbage that lakhs of pilgrims throw while on the Char Dham pilgrimage, creating a new ecological danger, experts and activists said.
In just 13 days since the pilgrimage began this year, over 500,000 pilgrims have visited the Char Dham shrines and another over a million are registered to visit. With the summer break expected in plains after mid-May, the rush of tourists and pilgrims is expected to increase. Officials estimate more than a million people would visit the state, including the pilgrims, in the next few months.
During the Char Dham pilgrimage, a person on average generates a minimum 7-9 kg of waste, assuming she takes nine days to complete the journey to all four shrines, according to Anoop Nautiyal, founder of Dehradun-based Social Development Communities Foundation.
“Thousands of tonnes of waste is generated during the Char Dham yatra (pilgrimage) season by pilgrims, in addition to day-to-day waste generated by people living in these areas, and other tourists and travellers going for treks,” Nautiyal said. “There is no system to properly dispose this waste.”
The Char Dham pilgrimage typically begins in May and continues till November. The start and end dates are determined by the Hindu religious almanac. It is one of the most popular pilgrimages in the Himalayas that see a huge influx of pilgrims in the mountain state.
In absence of any mechanism to dispose waste as per Solid Waste Management Rules 2016, Nautiyal said, the waste mostly ends up in the rivers, harming local ecology. In some places where waste is collected, it is often burnt in the open, causing air pollution. “Open waste and littering also worsen the monkey menace, which remains a major issue in the state,” he added.
Environmentalists are appalled at seeing pictures and videos on social media of garbage strewn all over the Yamuna, Bhagirathi and Alaknanda and Mandakini rivers on the Char Dham routes. At Yamnotri and Gangotri, the rivers are full of clothes pilgrims discard after taking a holy bath.
At Uttarkashi, a town on the way to Gangotri, the local municipality dumps waste near the Tambakhani tunnel at the main entry point of the town, most of which is washed into the Bhagirathi river.
“The smell is unbearable as a huge quantity of waste is being dumped near the Tambakhani tunnel on the road adjacent to the Ganga river, and sometimes the workers are involved in burning the waste, which is hazardous to the environment,” said Lokendra Bisht, a social activist in Uttarkashi.
Balwant Bisht, executive officer of Uttarkashi municipal board, admitted to the dumping, but said tenders have been floated to operate an alternate dumping site at nearby Tiloth.
In Chamoli, where the Badrinath temple is located, a video went viral last week, showing local district panachayat workers dumping garbage into the Alaknanda river. District magistrate Himanshu Khurana has since lodged a case against the workers. “I have also directed the officials to look for land so that waste can be disposed of scientifically,” Khurana said.
In Uttarkashi, subdivisional magistrate Shalini Negi admitted pilgrims were dumping waste and old clothes into the river. “We request them not to throw clothes in the rivers, but pilgrims still do it as they believe it is an act of faith,” she said.
“The pilgrims often throw clothes in the rivers here is due to superstitious beliefs. We have urged them to donate their clothes to the poor but due to their faith, it is becoming difficult to convince them,” Pawan Uniyal, temple priest and former president of Mandir Samiti Yamunotri, said.
Harish Rana, a local resident in Chamoli where Badrinath shrine is located, said: “We welcome pilgrims here but at the same time, we don’t want them to pollute these sacred mountains and rivers here by dumping waste. They should take their waste with them or throw them in dustbins wherever they find them. A true pilgrimage is where we don’t litter the house of god or a sacred place”
It is appalling to see both dry and wet waste being dumped into the river at Yamunotri, which indicates that the of waste management interventions are not being adhered to, leaving fragile Himalayan mountains in higher reaches polluted, said Vipin Kumar, an environmentalist who studies waste generation and disposal for Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre at state capital Dehradun.
“With over 500,000 pilgrims having visited the four major shrines so far and more than 10 lakh having registered, one can very well imagine the amount of waste that will be generated during the yatra period, which will go till November,” Kumar said. “We don’t have a sound waste management system and most visitors don’t throw garbage at designated places.”
Ravi Bisht, Uttarakhand’s mission manager of the Swachh Bharat (clean India) programme, said their focus is to form quick response teams after examining the issue of waste being dumped in rivers and issue directions to concerned district administrations to ensure no waste enters the rivers on the Char Dham route.
Door-to-door collection of waste has begun in 1,152 wards of the state’s urban local bodies, while source segregation is being done in 1,040 wards of the urban local bodies including Joshimath and Uttarkashi., he said, citing the swacchta (cleanliness) survey report.
