India to monitor water pollutants coming from Pakistan

For the first time, India will be monitoring water pollutants coming from Pakistan to end diplomatic row over highly polluted drains that flow between the two countries. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 25, 2011, 22:26:36 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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For the first time, India will be monitoring water pollutants coming from Pakistan to end diplomatic row over highly polluted drains that flow between the two countries.

The bone of contention is transboundary Hudiara canal, which zig-zags between India and Pakistan. It originates from Batala in Gurdaspur district of Punjab and enters Pakistan at Ladoo, before re-entering India and finally submerging into river Ravi after traveling for 63 kms in Pakistan.

Pakistan has been repeatedly accused over 100 industries on the banks of the canal in India for polluting the water used there for irrigation and thereby, causing human health problems. India on its part has been blaming industries in Pakistan for polluting it.

The water in Hudiara canal in Pakistan was labeled as unfit for human consumption in late 2000 whereas in India, its monitoring has been very poor. Industrial pollutants such as cadmium, chromium and copper had been found in the canal water and have lead to production of over vegetables.

“We will be setting up 139 hydrological stations on the drain to monitor its water quality on regular basis,” said chairman of the Central Pollution Control Board S P Gautam. The stations will be set up at short intervals to study deterioration of water quality as it flows in India.

“The stations will also be set up at the point the drain enters India and its exit,” he said.

The monitoring for the first time will provide conclusive evidence to the government on the culprit behind high pollution of the drain. The World Wide Fund for Nature in Pakistan has put up some monitoring stations on the drain in Pakistan under the United Nations projects.The Indian initiative being funded by World Bank is part of diplomatic confidence building mechanism between Indo-Pak. While the first step is monitoring, environment ministry officials are confidence that the second step would be efforts to clean up the drain in a joint effort with Pakistan government.

Ministry officials said the World Bank had approved the project in principle and was in process of finalizing the model of hydrological stations to be set up.

“The cost of setting up the stations will be worked out once the World Bank decides what type of stations they want,”a ministry official said.

Apart from Hudiara, the government is also looking at brining other transboundary drains under the progamme.

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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