Once more, with technologists

IITs have been roped in to clean the Ganga

Twenty-five years after launching the Ganga Action Plan (GAP), the government has realised that a new plan backed by proper technical advice is needed to clean this mighty river, which is fast turning into a drain. A consortium of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been roped in to suggest strategies and actions to rejuvenate the Ganga basin and restore the quality of river water. This, in a way, is tantamount to confessing that over a thousand crore of rupees have been frittered away in the past quarter-century on cleaning the Ganga without making any headway. The Ganga is more polluted now than in 1985, when the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, launched the Ganga Action Plan. The Ganga basin is the largest in the country and the fourth-biggest in the world. It is a source of livelihood for the 400 million people who live along its 2,500-km length from Gangotri in the Himalayas to Ganga Sagar, where it merges into the Bay of Bengal.

The 100 big, medium and small towns on the river’s banks generate over 3,000 million litres of sewage every day. Much of this sewage is discharged into the river without appropriate treatment. Most industrial units located near the river also dispose of their untreated effluents in the river. The other scourges of the river include habitations and farming on the riverbed itself, religious rituals like idol emersion, cremation of human bodies on its banks and disposal of corpses in it. As a result, degradation of Ganga water begins right from Rishikesh and Hardwar, where it enters the plains, and continues to worsen as it moves on. It begins to stink by the time it reaches Kanpur.

How to tackle the pollution of the river is no great scientific or technological secret, and was known even in 1985. What the IITs are being asked to do now is to rediscover the wheel. The strategy mooted in the 1980s by the Central Ganga Authority, subsequently renamed as the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), for cleaning the Ganga envisaged sewage treatment plants and oxidation ponds to raise the dissolved oxygen (DO) content of water before letting it into the river. It also stipulated measures to reverse the denudation of the river’s catchments to ensure that only clean, mud-free water pours into it, to reduce its turbidity. These plans failed largely because they required, for their success, the cooperation of state governments and a large number of civic bodies; this was not forthcoming in the manner required.

The strategies to be worked out by the IITs will have to revolve round similar approaches, perhaps with better (more modern) technologies which may help get around some operational hurdles. One option that the IITs must consider is restoring the biological processes that keep river waters clean in a natural way. Such strategies are likely to prove more durable than others.