Need three years to develop capacity for Bengaluru lakes' revival: Prakash Javadekar

Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday said that it will take at least three years to develop the capacity and infrastructure for revival of the Bengaluru lakes.

"Things don't happen overnight... It's the backlog of nearly 50 years... reality is that half of Bengaluru's sewage goes untreated to its lakes, for which we need to build the capacity which will take another three years," Javadekar said here after a review meeting on the restoration of the Bengaluru lakes.

Minister of Chemicals and Fertilisers Anant Kumar and Karnataka Forest Minister Ramanath Rai also attended the meeting.

The meeting also emphasised on revival of the Bellandur lake, the largest of the 262 lakes and tanks in Bengaluru, that receives about 40% of the city's sewage. In May 2015, froth over the Bellandur lake caught fire due to formation of flammable methane gas.

"We have put a condition of 24X7 monitoring of all the existing STPs of Bengaluru and we will monitor the progress (of lake revival plan and development of new STPs) every six months," Javadekar added.

Everyday about 1,280 million litre of sewage is generated in Bengaluru, while the city's infrastructure has capacity to handle only 721 million litre of sewage. Since 137 out of 500 Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) are defunct, only 600 million litre sewage is treated and the rest goes to the lakes.

Javadekar said the Karnataka government has banned plastic and prepared a time-bound "lake by lake" restoration plan.

The central government will invest Rs 800 crore to rejuvenate the lakes. The funds would be released under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) scheme.

"We are working on bio-development of the lakes. We will remove all the pollution through STPs with the help of Urban Development Ministry in public-private partnership mode," Anant Kumar said here.