BANGALORE - India has signed a deal for a US$1 billion loan from the World Bank that will go towards an ambitious project, Mission Clean Ganga, which aims at halting the discharge of untreated sewage and industrial effluents into the Ganga River (or Ganges) by 2020.
Given the enormity of the challenge, many fear that the massive infusion of funds could just result in more money going down the drain.
The roughly 2,500-kilometer-long Ganga originates in the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas in India's Uttarakhand state. It leaves the mountains at Rishikesh and hits the plains at Haridwar, then flows east through the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal before entering Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, where it is known as
the Padma River, it is joined by the Brahmaputra; the two then go on to form the world's largest delta before emptying their waters into the Bay of Bengal.
Around a quarter of India's 1.2 billion-strong population live in towns and villages along the Ganga. They depend on it for drinking water, irrigation and livelihood. They also turn to it for spiritual sustenance.
The Ganga is worshipped by Hindus. They believe that the goddess Ganga descended to Earth through the matted locks of the deity, Shiva. A dip in the Ganga is believed to cleanse one of all sins. Thousands of Hindus are cremated on its banks. People from across the country come to the Ganga to immerse the ashes after the cremation of their kin.
The holiest of India's rivers, the Ganga is also among the world's dirtiest. If in the upper reaches it is dams and mining and stone crushing units that are choking it, downstream it is untreated sewage - over 12,000 million liters of sewage pours into the Ganga daily - as well as effluents from tanneries, industrial waste and agricultural runoffs that have reduced this sacred river to a dark, stinking sewer.
A fecal coliform count exceeding 50 per 100 ml and 500 per 100 ml is considered unsafe for drinking and bathing respectively. For agricultural use, the count must not cross 5,000. But the Ganga's average fecal coliform count overshoots these limits dangerously, which means that its water is not only unfit for drinking or bathing but also farming.
Consider the quality of the water at Varanasi, a temple town on the banks of the Ganga that millions of pilgrims and foreign tourists visit. Upstream of Varanasi's ghats, the Ganga's fecal coliform count is 60,000 per 100 ml; downstream the figure rises to 1.5 million.
If at Varanasi, the Ganga is sullied mainly by sewage - 32 sewers from the town empty themselves into the river - plastic and animal and human corpses that can be seen floating in the river, at Kanpur it is the industrial units, especially the tanneries, that discharge chemicals and heavy metals like chromium into the river.
Even in its upper reaches, the Ganga is not free from filth. Nearly 89 million liters of sewage is spewed daily into the river from 12 small towns in the Himalayas. At Haridwar, the fecal coliform count exceeds 5,500.
Drinking water with high fecal coliform bacteria can lead to typhoid, dysentery, cholera, viral and bacterial gastroenteritis. Contents of industrial effluents are carcinogenic and are also known to cause kidney and liver problems.
The Ganga is not just dirty, it has become a deadly river.
And the Indian government is slowly stirring out of its stupor. It announced the Mission Clean Ganga and set up a National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) in February 2009 with an objective to "ensure effective abatement of pollution and conservation of the river Ganga by adopting a river basin approach for comprehensive planning and management".
Given the length and catchment of this river, its economic, social, religious and cultural significance and the vast diversity of the terrain - it flows from the icy Himalayan mountains to India's vast plains - the objective is certainly ambitious in scope.
The project will cost around US$1.5 billion and the World Bank will support the Indian government with technical assistance and $1 billion loan.
Many are skeptical whether the mission will be a success. After all, earlier attempts have failed. In 1985, for instance, the $226 million Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi amid much fanfare. It was able to create waste water treatment capacity in some areas but much of this lies unused due to power cuts. It failed to halt raw waste disposal into the Ganga.
Twenty-six years on, the Ganga is dirtier than ever before.
Critics have blamed GAP's failure to poor conception, inadequate finances, corruption and mismanagement.
However, Mission Clean Ganga is an improvement. It is better funded for one. Unlike previous efforts that focused only on those towns and industrial centers that were considered to be highly polluting, Mission Clean Ganga is taking a holistic view of the entire Gangetic basin.
Besides, the NGRBA is a powerful body. Headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, its other members include ministers from the finance, environment, power, water resources ministries besides the chief ministers of the five states through which the Ganga runs. Well respected civil society members are also in the NGRBA.
However, the approach is top-down, laments Shripad Dharmadhikary, coordinator of the Manthan Adhyanan Kendra, a center that researches and monitors water and energy issues. River basin planning "requires a bottom-up approach with widespread and deep-rooted participation from the people", he writes. Objectives, details of development activities, prioritization of needs, etc need to evolve from this process. In the Clean Ganga Mission, however, "the whole logic is being turned upside down, with the planning being done from top down".
There is concern too over the participation of the World Bank in the project. The Bank has funded big dams and development that has been harsh on the environment. When it is part of the problem that rivers like the Ganga face, why depend on it for technical assistance on a solution?
Much of the funding for the project will go towards building infrastructure and institutional capacity to reduce pollution of the Ganga. Dharmadhikary argues that the "persistence of pollution is not really due to lack of technology or infrastructure or institutional capacity. While these are important, in the Indian scenario, the critical factors are the general ethos, the lack of accountability in regulatory and administrative agencies and the absence of political will in the government and administration. Unless these are addressed, pouring in massive amounts of money, and privatization may actually worsen the situation."
And importantly, the public and the priests must be roped in to keep the Ganga clean.
For centuries, Hindus have believed in the purifying qualities of the Ganga. Not only did it rid people of their sins but also the river had the capacity to cleanse itself. Scientific studies have indicated that such beliefs are at least partially correct.
While all rivers have the capacity to rejuvenate themselves, the Ganga's waters reportedly have unique anti-bacterial properties, a kind of self-purifying quality that makes its waters possess oxygen levels 25 times higher than any other river in the world. But so terrible is the pollution of the Ganga and the infrastructure construction around and across it that it is now losing its special resilience.
Rampant dam building in the upper reaches of the river is undermining the Ganga's capacity to rejuvenate itself.
When forced to pass through tunnels, where there is no oxygen and sunlight, the river loses its capacity for self-purification. Hydro-electric power projects alter the riverbed's basic composition, triggering off crucial hydrological and biological changes in the river. The quality of water tested at the Maneri Bhali Phase 1 project's inlet was found to be "clean" but was "heavily polluted" at the end of the reservoir.
If India is keen to clean the Ganga, it will also have to ensure that the river's inbuilt water purifier is not destroyed. That will require putting a halt to the ongoing excessive dam building activity, among other things. It means changing the course of the development path that the country has set out on.
That is something neither the government nor the project's financial backers - the World Bank - will be interested in.
No comments:
Post a Comment