States' non-coop hurdle in cleaning rivers: Centre

New Delhi, July 15: The Centre finds non-cooperation by state governments as the major stumbling block in executing river cleaning projects.

After creation of assests like sewage treatment plants under the river action plans, state governments do not adequately provide for their operation and maintenance, says the Ministry of Environment and Forests in a report The execution requires timely and adequate funds, but states show failure on this count.

There are also cases of non-availability of power supply for operation of the plants.

Besides lack of expertise and the capacity to arrange regular staff for operating the machines is also a recurring problem.

The Centre says it prepares the river cleaning schemes on the basis of current estimates of the pollution load of the rivers.

But because of the continuous increase in the population along the banks of the rivers leading to their pollution and gap in the availability of financial resources to take up the works of commensurate with the requirements, there is always some backlog left.

After the Ganga Action Plan, the government decided to extend the model to cover other major rivers of the country through a National River Action Plan (NRAP) in which the active and meaningful participation of states was a must for success.

The cost of the capital works would be shared equally between the Centre and the state governments and the cost of operation and maintenance of plants and works would be fully borne by respective governments.

All this requires sensitivity to the issue of degradation of the rivers and the environmental degradation as a whole, which the report said was found to be lacking as evidenced by the conduct of states in the implementation of the river action plans.

There are a large number of rivers in the country running to a total length of over 4500 km.

These rivers fall under 113 river basins having a total cathchment area of 3.12 million sq Km.

There are 12 major river basisns and their tributaries systems accounting for 85 per cent of the total surface flow.

Over the decades with population explosion and rapid industrialisation, indiscriminate exploitation of riverine resources took place, resulting in pollution of almost all the rivers in one stretch or the other.

UNI