Clean all rivers by end of 11th plan: Planning Commission

Planning Commission has embarked upon an ambitious plan to clean all rivers to bathing quality, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 26, 2006, 19:54:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Even as the government continues to receive flak from Supreme Court on high level of pollution in Yamuna and Ganga, the final approach paper of the Planning Commission has embarked upon an ambitious plan to clean all rivers to bathing quality and developing river front tourism spots.

The Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Coliform level in many stretches of river Yamuna (especially in Delhi) and Ganga is much more than the standard prescribed by Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), thus making the water unsuitable for bathing quality. This is despite the government spending over Rs 2,000 crores in the last decade under different projects for cleaning these rivers.

With the failures not withstanding, the commission wants the Environment and Forest ministry to improve the water quality in all the major rivers of the country to that of the bathing quality. For that, the level of total Coliforms in 100 millilitre water should be brought down to 500 or less, pH should to between 6.5 and 8.5 and dissolved oxygen 5 mg per litre or more and BOD three mg per litre or less.

While Ganga has one of the longest stretch (1,760 km) that is polluted in terms of BOD load, the others are Tapi, Narmada, Indus, Mahi and Sabarmati. CPCB's 10 years of data shows that 14 per cent of the entire riverine length in the country (6,086 km) is severely polluted with BOD level with more than 6 mg per litre. About 19 per cent is moderately polluted whereas 67 per cent rivers are relatively clean. Maharashtra has longest river length with high BOD level followed by Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and then Gujarat. About 1.35 lakh pollution industries are cause for generation of 13,000 million litres of wastewater that flows in these rivers every day.

The Commission is, however, willing to fund cleaning of rivers for sustainable development but wants more private participation in the work. "There is a need to augment 850 water quality monitoring stations. No untreated waste water should be discharged into rivers by end of the 11th five-year plan," the paper says.

The paper also lays emphasis on improvement in solid waste management, preservation of wildlife and bio-diversity and mitigating land degradation through green cover. A special emphasis has been given on improving green cover as recent surveys have recoded a 6.3 per cent fall in dense forest cover. The paper recommends more involvement of Panchayati Raj Institutions in improving green cover through agro-forestry measures.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan @hindustantimes.com

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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