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NEW DELHI: From a boat on the Yamuna River that flows past India’s capital, it’s easy to spot bubbles of fetid gas sent up to the water’s surface by rotting sewage — and that’s after at least $350 million has been spent on cleaning it up.
Now, with New Delhi to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and the sports village meant to house the athletes being built on the stinking river’s banks, India must do in three years what has not been achieved in the last decade.
Boatman Lalla Navwalla, 36, whose brother spends eight hours a day swimming for coins tossed in by Hindu pilgrims who still revere the river, understands perfectly why the river is dirty.
“Once you could look 20 feet down and see the coins,” he said, looking expressionlessly at the opaque grey water.
“But after the 80s the population started growing and the river became dirty.” More people means more waste, and all of Delhi’s three and a half billion litres of daily urine, excrement and other waste flow into the Yamuna — much of it raw as treatment plants struggle to keep up.
“Delhi is growing very fast. The gap is always widening,” said R.C. Trivedi, an official at India’s Central Pollution Control Board monitoring agency.
Boatman Navwalla says he remembers when there were tortoises living in the water. Now the only thriving life forms are bacteria.
NATIONWIDE PROBLEM: What has happened in the Yamuna is happening to rivers all over India, where 30 per cent of the population now lives in cities, straining infrastructure that was creaky to begin with.
These teeming cities take more and more water from rivers or groundwater reserves, returning it as barely treated waste.
Water-hungry Delhi dams take about 1.1 billion litres of fresh water, more than a third of what the city uses every day.
After that, only drains carrying thick sewage feed the river.
Delhi has invested a huge amount on waste treatment in the last decade: between $170 million and $214 million according to estimates from the non-profit Centre for Science and the Environment which put out a study on the river in April.
But the city grew — from 1991 to 2001 its population expanded by 47 per cent — and now a third of Delhi’s waste, the biggest cause of the river’s pollution, goes into the Yamuna untreated, the pollution monitoring board says.
The city is playing a game of catch-up, and losing it could be deadly, environmentalists say.
“We can’t afford to develop a waste treatment culture where only some part of waste is treated,” said Centre for Science and Environment director Sunita Narain. “One hidden cost of a dirty river is bad health” for people living downstream.
Every year almost 400,000 Indian children die because of diarrhoea alone, according to Unicef.
“The government starts throwing money at the problem without really understanding what the problem is,” said Shreekant Gupta, who until March headed the National Institute for Urban Affairs think-tank.
“The response has been to put money into sewage treatment plants where half the drains are not connected to them.”—AFP
