Yamuna still dirty despite huge funds being pumped in: CSE

New Delhi, Apr 18 (UNI) Delhi has spent a whopping Rs 1,491 crore on cleaning the Yamuna till 2006 that is Rs 71-85 crore per km in the 22-km stretch of the river as it passes through the city, but in spite of this, the river still runs dirty, according to the Centre of Science and Environment.

''There is obviously something fundamentally wrong in the way we are managing our river cleaning programmes. Our planners believe in spending money without understanding the connection between sewage and its disposal and river pollution,'' CSE Director Sunita Narain said today.

She was speaking at the release of CSE's latest publication, 'Sewage Canal: How to Clean the Yamuna'. The book was released by the union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

CSE also premiered a 32-minute film 'Faecal Attraction: Political Economy of Defecation' on the subject that exploded various myths about river cleaning. ''The film is our way of connecting the river to our water and sewage,'' its Director Pradip Saha said.

''The Yamuna has become dirtier, and so have the towns along its stretch. And Delhi is its biggest polluter, followed by Agra, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. The Yamuna's 22-km stretch in Delhi is barely two per cent of the length of the river, but contributes over 70 per cent of the pollution load,'' CSE's River Pollution Campaign Deputy Coordinator S V Suresh Babu said.

Delhi, with only five per cent of the nation's urban population, had 40 per cent of India's sewage treatment capacity. Despite this huge investment, the Yamuna remained as dirty as ever. The river, in fact, was relatively clean till it entered Delhi at Wazirabad. It left the city transformed into a murky sewer.

In Delhi, the river had virtually no freshwater for nine months.

Delhi impounded all its water at Wazirabad, where the dammed up river practically ceases to exist; what flowed subsequently was only sewage and waste from Delhi's 22 drains. There was just no water available to dilute this waste.

Pollution levels in the Yamuna had risen. Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) load had increased 2.5 times between 1980 and 2005 -- from 117 tonne per day (TPD) in 1980 to 276 TPD in 2005. Dissolved Oxygen (DO) -- to check if the river was alive -- in the upper segments, considered pristine, was dipping, indicating an increase in organic pollution.

By the time the river was midway through Delhi, the total coliform count was so high that it was difficult to count the zeroes. Pesticides and heavy metals were also present in the river.

In fact, the river did not meet minimum standards for bathing even after treatment. There had been no change in pollution levels in Delhi from 1996. On April 10, 2001, the Supreme Court had directed that DO levels were to be maintained at a minimum concentration of four Milligram/Litre but five years after, the river was still dead.

It was clear that all the money spent to clean the Yamuna had literally gone down the drain, writers of Sewage Canal said.

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