Dying rivers: Washed away by our sins (Times of India- Jan. 13,2011)

Nitin Sethi,

Geetika Narang walks around Connaught Place in Delhi, asking random people two simple questions: "Where do you get your water from and where does your shit go?" She is assisting Pradip Saha make a documentary: Faecal Attraction. It's on the death of the Yamuna. "My water? I guess, from Yamuna," says a slightly embarrassed middle-aged man caught by a TV camera. "And the shit?" Geetika persists. "Hmm, there only," he says, as he shies away from the question. Most others are less sure. "Hain, shit? I don't know, man, all of that happens automatically, I don't know." "Goes in the air." "Goes into water." "How do I know where it goes from the sewer?" Geetika records some of the answers and laughs over them later. But where does it really go? Most of it flows directly into our water systems — our rivers, ponds and lakes, seeping down into the groundwater. India generates a massive 38,000 million litres of sewage every day. Even for the record, the government has the capacity to treat only about 12,000 million tonnes, that's less than onethird of the muck. The 35 metropolitan cities of India alone produce 15,644 million litres of sewage daily.

In Delhi, where the government has over the decades spent the maximum amount of resources to clean the Yamuna, 40 per cent of the mess generated flows untreated into the river. The Supreme Court may have been seized of the matter for a decade but nearly half of the population in the Capital does not have a sewage system and the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna remains the most polluted river section in the country.

According to the National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3 ), conducted in 2005-2006 , a mere 26 per cent of rural India has sanitation. The urban sanitation coverage is 83.2 per cent and the all-India coverage is an abysmal 44.6 per cent.

So this is what we do — load water systems close by with our sewage and all sorts of pollutants and then go further out to get water. And because water in the backyard is too dirty, we either dig underground or draw it from a source far up in the hills. Water for Delhi, for instance, comes from the Ganga and Beas rivers 400 km away. It is piped all the way to fulfill the need of millions in its unending sprawl. Bangalore has to get it from the Cauvery 90 km away; Indore from the Narmada 75 km away, and Hyderabad from the Krishna 116 km away. It costs 10 times more than we pay in some cases. But someone does pay, upstream or downstream of us.

The end result: we slowly kill our rivers, literally throttle them, even as the groundwater keeps depleting at a matching pace. In the hills, we dam the rivers — drawing water for irrigation, power and direct use. Downstream, once the river hits the plains, it becomes a dumping ground. It's a double whammy for the river and a tragedy for the people who live along it.

Degrading catchment areas make it worse. With the reduction in forests and the disappearance of natural recharge zones in the mountains, less and less water seeps into the rivers. In fact, almost all Indian rivers seem to be going through these calamitous changes. Large stretches of key rivers have become so polluted that they are not even safe to bathe in. More than half the length of the Ganga is now considered unfit by the Central Pollution Control Board ( CPCB). It's the same story with the Mahanadi, with a little over 500 km of its stretch rotting. For the Godavari, it is 1,700 km, for the Narmada 480 km, and the Tapi 400 km.

Take the case of the Sutlej, in which tonnes of dead fish were recently found floating on the surface, their underskin darkened, bellies putrid. This occurrence has, shockingly, recurred in the past four years in what once used to be the lifeline of the state. Industrial pollution, clearly, has taken its toll. Punjab witnesses major aquatic mortality in the rainy season because industries store their potent and untreated water in huge pits and, under the cover of the monsoon and flash floods, release the toxic waste into the river. Skin diseases are common among people who come in contact with the water. Though yet to be proved scientifically, many also link certain forms of cancer and mental diseases to harmful chemicals seeping into the drinking water system. And if life in a river dies, can the river itself survive?

It's just the details that change as one looks across the country at the health of Indian rivers. In the industrial area of Bengal's Burdwan, the Banka river, which runs parallel to the Damodar, has lost its navigability over the years, thanks to silting, dumping of city waste and polyethylene. During the colonial era, Banka was a drinking water source for Burdwan. But now, many points on the river are choked by brickfields and rice-mill waste.

In Maharashtra, five of the 20 notified rivers — Godavari, Tapi, Bheema, Krishna-Panchganga and Wainganga — are facing danger, reveals a survey done by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. While waste water discharge has increased manifold in the Godavari, at Panchavati in Nashik the construction of a dam at Gangapur has significantly reduced the dilution and selfpurification capacity of the river. "If the Godavari river is exploited further, it can die soon," says a chief engineer with the Maharashtra irrigation department. Mumbai's Mithi river is now a drain, but historians and naturalists remind us that there was a time when tigers from the forested area ventured out for a sip. Elsewhere in the state, several perennial rivers have either shrunk or become seasonal. Environmentalist Dilip Gode says rivers like the Kanhan, Kolar, Chudamani and Sitna were perennial until the early 1970s, but these days they dry up by February.

Turn south and the rivers flow no better. The meandering course of the Palar and its gurgling water was a lifeline for perennially rain-starved northern Tamil Nadu for centuries. But today, the 295 km-long water body is called the 'lost' river, vanquished by stinking effluents from leather tanneries lining its basin. And consider this for irony: the completely dry and woefully-polluted Palar bed and its once-fertile farms have now turned into a motor racing track. The tannery hub of Vellore, on the banks of the Palar, is now rated among the country's most polluted spots.

If the Palar has 'perished' in northern Tamil Nadu, the textile export centre of western Tamil Nadu has turned the Noyyal river into a multi-coloured gutter. Tirupur's textile units fetch over Rs 10,000 crore in foreign exchange every year, but the price for the exponential export growth, mostly over the last two decades, has been paid by the Noyyal, whose waters were once famed for being "sweet and tasty" .

Karnataka, too, is in trouble. "There is no dispute about the fact that the water level in the Cauvery has come down drastically," says Dr P N Ravindra of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board. "Add to this the increase in total organic compounds in the water due to increasing urbanisation and industrialisation and we have a potent mix."

Rivers are dead and dying in India with no plan for recovery or revival. And though the government has not sat idle, all its money seems to be lost in technical 'solutions' that fail miserably. "Rajasthan was a waterborne state," says Magsaysay Award winner Rajendra 'Waterman' Singh. "About 200 years back, thousands of travellers would stop by Jaisalmer for a drink of water. They poured in everyday in great numbers. But now it is totally dry, the result of doing away with the earlier system of community-driven water management. It was this decentralised practice that had kept rivers alive. Now, the Maru Ganga, or the Luni river, is well on its way to getting lost in the desert trail. The river is near dead. Industrial pollution has murdered it."

Nitish Priyadarshi, professor of geology and environmental science at Ranchi University, says rivers like the Argora and the Harmu have vanished in Jharkhand. "Satellite pictures reveal that small seasonal rivers have been encroached upon in villages, and in cities they have been filled up to construct buildings," he adds. Leading Damodar Bachao Adolan activist Saryu Rai says there's a reason for this. "We have no authority that takes care of the rivers and regulates construction of dams and barrages. No wonder, some of our big rivers look like pocket streams."

Not that we don't have a plethora of laws and regulations. There are wings of the central and state government obsessed with rivers. It's just that they work at cross purposes or remain disconnected from each other. "For the state, the rivers have two purposes — to extract from (and store) and to dump into. A river with flowing fresh water has no value," says Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People. "Rivers in their natural state also supply several services to society. It's a source of immense biodiversity, livelihood, irrigation and recharge of ground water. But when the government decides to block a river and build a dam, the cost-benefit analysis does not take these into account."

The trouble, primarily, lies in the disaggregated management of rivers. While the power and water ministries look at rivers merely as a source of hydropower and irrigation, the environment and forests ministry is concerned only with the quality of water and has little control over the planning of a river basin. Then there is the urban development ministry, which wants to set up as many sewage treatment plants and drinking water regimes as it can. The rural development ministry, too, has a sanitation target to pursue.

Laws and regulations do not mandate that the entire gamut of projects on a river basin be tested for their cumulative impact on the river system and the people living near it. Each hydroelectric/irrigation scheme comes up for clearance at different levels — financial, environmental and technical. This piecemeal approach has obvious and inherent flaws. Of course, nobody does anything about it.

So, even as sewage treatment facilities are being built downstream on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, dam proponents merrily plan to create dozens of reservoirs on the tributaries to the river, reducing its flow and making sewage treatment ineffective.

"There is no basin-wide blueprint for our rivers," says S V Suresh Babu, a Bangalore-based water policy expert. "There has to be a plan for the entire basin and not individual stems of a system — the irrigation projects, the increasing demand for drinking water, the increased dumping of sewage, the hydropower projects. A plan that says this is the carrying capacity of the river for extraction or for dumping. Or, for just leaving the river alone for a stretch."

The first such attempt, though, has been made with the formation of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, where all the riparian states and various arms of the central government will sit together to plan a future course that will manage both the 'quality and quantity' of the river. But it's a nebulous start — and with a river on which the government has already spent countless thousands of crores to clean up, with little or no result.

Thakkar points out that at the moment the government does not even mandate a minimum ecological flow to be maintained in the river basins. While an unbridled river would be ideal, with so many competing demands on the river basin, environmentalists suggest that rivers carry at least a minimal level of water that keeps the basic ecological functions alive.

Curiously, when Himachal Pradesh in 2007 passed a notification calling for such a minimum ecological flow in sections of the river flowing through the hill state, a power project developer opposed it in court and the environment and forests ministry (MoEF) came out in support of the developer, stating that the laws and regulations did not allow for such a direction.

"We have created this bizarre artifice of river management by drawing political boundaries over resources and waste," says Pradip Saha. "We call the river water as 'x' state's resource and the waste that flows into it as 'y' state's mess. To keep a check on the health of Indian rivers, the basic unit of planning has to be the basin." He wonders if five years from now he'll be able to tell where water comes from and where waste disappears into.

Nor would anyone else, unless a proper river management system is put in place. Everything, as they say, will continue to go down the drain. And as a mahant at Varanasi said, "Where will we go to wash our sins if the rivers dry up?"


nitin.sethi@timesgroup .com

(With reports from Yogesh Naik, Swati Sengupta, Radha Venkatesan, Ashish Roy, Balwant Garg, Priya Yadav, Yudhvir Rana, Anindo Dey, Jayashree Nandi, Sanjeev Kumar Verma)