Change flush-&-forget mindset, cry for Yamuna (Times of India 29 March 2010)

Yamuna is Delhi’s river. It flows through our city. But it is our shame. This is why we must build the movement to clean the river. But cleaning the river will take each one of us to connect our waste — our flush toilet — with the river. It will begin only if we can change our flush-and-forget mindset.

The fact is that Delhi has already spent a huge amount on cleaning the little stretch of the Yamuna which flows through the city. Some Rs 1,500 crore spent on cleaning this 22-km stretch of the river is possibly the highest in the country, if not the world. But all this has meant little.

The city spends and will spend much more. But it is money down the river as pollution only increases. The river, by all pollution parameters, is dead. It has just not been officially cremated.

Solutions exist. But these will first require us to relearn pollution in the rich cities of poor India. We will then understand that the answer is not in building more sewage treatment capacity or more drains and repairing even more drains to clean the river.

Just think. Delhi has already got 17 sewage treatment plants, which together add up to 40 per cent of the total installed sewage treatment capacity in India. But the fact is that these plants remain grossly underutilized.

Why? Because the city does not have drainage to convey all our excreta to the sewage treatment plants. It is expensive to build sewage drainage but even more expensive to maintain it. Today, the bulk of our city is not connected to underground drainage. It also finds that it can never repair enough. The end result is that where there is a sewage treatment plant, there is no waste to treat.

But that is only part of the story. Worse, we forget that the majority of Delhi lives unconnected to underground drainage in what we call unauthorized and illegal colonies. We forget that these areas will have sewage and that this will flow into open drains criss-crossing the city. But these are the same drains, flowing past colonies, in which the sewage treatment plant disposes of its treated effluent.

So think. In this pollution scheme, the illegal unconnected waste of the majority is being mixed with the treated waste of the minority. The result is obvious: growing pollution in the river. We can never clean Yamuna until we can treat the sewage of all in the city.

The economics of this waste matter is important to grasp. We have to pay first for the water we use and then for the waste we generate. This is because the more water we use in our houses, the more the waste we discharge. The water inequity in Delhi is legendary — parts of the city are water-flushed with over 200 litres per capita and then the rest gets a few drops.

But what we don’t realize is that we who use water and discharge the waste which ends up in the river do not pay the cost of water or its cleaning. Here’s how: It roughly costs Delhi government Rs 8-9 per kilolitre (1000 litres) to supply our water. It costs them five times more to take it back, pump it, pipe it and then treat it. We in Delhi pay nothing more than Rs 2.50 per kilolitre for our water and practically nothing for waste. How then can we get a clean river?

But it is not just the cost that we need to pay. The fact is that all governments (including Delhi) are designing systems that we cannot pay for. These are unaffordable systems to pipe water over long distances, which add to the cost of distribution and, worse, increase the losses of water. Then we design to take back the waste and pump it and pipe it over even longer distances. The cost of electricity for pumping, and even more the exorbitant cost of first building and then maintaining the infrastructure, means that nothing really changes. This is why we have to relearn the science and art of river cleaning. This is why business as usual will not add up to a clean river.