Clean Ganga to cost upwards of Rs 9,000 Crore (The Pioneer 18 March 2010)

Even that may not be enough
The Government may have spent Rs 782 crore during the last three years on cleaning up the Ganga, but the exercise to restore the revered river to its pristine glory remained a distant dream. The Planning Commission of India in its latest report to the Supreme Court has said that even achieving a 100 per cent sewage treatment plant utilisation would end up cleaning just one-third of the total waste generated in the Ganga basin.

The report titled, ‘Report on Utilisation of Funds and Assets Created through GAP in States under GAP’ was on Wednesday filed in the apex court, which is monitoring the Ganga Action Plan in its bid to ensure that the river is kept clean.

Commenting on the health of the river, the Commission said, “The goal of cleaning Ganga has not been fully achieved. The quality of the river water at some locations has marginally improved while in many other locations, the quality in terms of Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) has, in fact, worsened. Quality in terms of faecal coliform (FC) count has been poor virtually all along the river downstream of Haridwar.”

Blaming the deterioration of the river on “faulty planning of capacities”, despite satisfactory utilisation of funds under GAP I and GAP II, the Commission noted, “Even if all the targeted capacities materialise and operate, the problem will still persist as the domestic sewage being generated is many times the STP (sewage treatment plant) capacity installed.”

It noted the gap between the demand for STPs and the supply in terms of existing STP capacity while putting a question mark on how GAP II could solve this imbalance between demand and supply. In figures, the report explained, “Domestic sewage generation in the Ganga basin is about 12,000 MLD (million litres per day) while STP capacity is 3750 MLD, just about 31 per cent of sewage generation.”

Projecting the work ahead under the Plan to clean the river by 2020, the report added, “The sewage generation in the whole of the Ganga basin is estimated at 15,000 MLD in 2020 from 12,000 MLD currently…An additional 8,250 MLD needs to be established even to meet the current backlog, whereas additional capacity of 11,250 MLD needs to be created by 2020.”

On the national scene too, the scenario is depressing, states the report.

With an estimated waste generation across the country (in Class I and II towns) of 36,000 MLD, all the STPs functioning across the country put together would only treat 7,000 MLD, in other words, over 29,000 MLD untreated sewage joining the rivers.

Commenting on the Ganga in particular, the report observed, “The BOD level keeps worsening as one goes downstream along the river from Rishikesh and is worst at Allahabad. It is only when other rivers join the Ganga and dilution takes place that BOD level improves.”

In the Eleventh Plan document, the report commented that average capacity utilisation of the existing STP capacity is only about 72 per cent against the desired 100 per cent. Citing reasons, the report recorded, “This is mostly due to factors like irregular power supply, absence of connections between domestic sewage drains and STPs, and failure of States to provide for maintenance costs of STPs.”

To achieve the intended target to cleanse the Ganga, the report concluded that for meeting the projected requirement for 2020, “the resources required would vary from Rs 2,812 crore to Rs 9,788 crore”. This could be provided for under the Jawharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, the Commission recommended to the MoEF.