| Mr.
Babu expresses the need for People’s
movement in protecting the Rivers
in India.
We have to initiate a people’s
movement. It could be anyone; the
number of people living in the banks
of Ganga is 40% of India’s
population, which is about four
hundred fifty to five hundred million
people. Every person who use this
water contributes to the sewage,
pollution. This message has to inculcated
in the minds of the people. Incentive
them to use water efficiently.
The privileged
classes from the cities never think
twice before wasting water. For
example in Delhi, the government
is providing two hundred and twenty
liters of water, person per day
and the ground water supply are
extracted privately.
So it is very important to motivate
and facilitate people to move towards
water efficient habit. The concerned
authority has to work with the common
people and also the city government
to bring about the change in the
mind set.
The biggest
lesson learnt in GAP is that long
distance conveyance of sewage is
not going to work. Under GAP, sewage
treatment plan was constructed on
lands, while no treatment plan was
created where there were sewage.
In the process you don’t see
the sewage treatment plan receiving
any sewage and operating well.
So we should re-work this paradigm
and understand where we can facilitate
the community to treat and reuse
the waste locally. This will reduce
the dependence on fresh water. If
the community practices this, we’ll
have more flow as well as the pollution
will get reduced in the rivers.
We are
witnessing across the world that
thousands of people are resorting
to decentralized wastewater treatment.
They are treating waste appropriately,
reusing water for flushing, lawns
and gardens and thus reducing the
pressure of fresh water resources.
Breaking
the mind set of the bureaucrats
is one of our biggest challenges.
They are not technology neutral
but always biased towards one technology
or other. Because of which the small
initiates by the people are getting
ignored.
We need to create a pressure and
demand to involve people in monitoring
of any plans for the Ganga River.
Let the then participate in drawing
a plan for the safety of Ganga.
Instead of just involving them in
the street plays etc, asked them
to join right from the initial stage
of planning, drawing mechanism and
monitoring.
We should
simplify pollution and should not
set complicated indicators like
Bio chemical Oxygen demand. This
might be little difficult for the
people to understand.
We should apply some acceptable
parameters like colour, depth of
the base that is visible from the
top of the river. Let the people
report back of what is happening
and what is not happening.
We need
a proper plan to grow where the
consumption and the resource availability
are balanced. Today there is no
natural resource assessment or water
resource assessment happening. The
smaller cities in the Vision document
mentions to expand from a square
kilometer today to 2.5 square kilometers.
This is not the ideal way to grow.
The last
and the major issue, which I anticipate
is the data availability in India.
One of the reasons for the failure
of GAP and other river cleaning
programs was that we didn’t
have a hold of the problems. Today
if you ask any city cooperation
or the government as to how much
water is being used in their city
they will have no answers or provide
us with some figure based on the
official water supply data. We must
acknowledge and recognize the private
extraction of ground water, which
is happening in cities and towns.
We have
a massive dependence on ground water.
So we need to know how much water
we extract, waste and work on it.
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