No money to clean up Yamuna but plenty spent on propaganda, rue environmentalists
No provision of funds for Yamuna Cleansing in the Union Budget has irked environmentalists. They rued that the Centre granted Rs 2,000 crore for cleaning of holy river Ganges but conveniently forgot another important river, Yamuna. The Delhi Government has urged the Centre to grant Rs 1,000 crore for cleaning of Yamuna. Recently, the Government has sent a high-level team to Gujarat to study the river development and cleaning of river Sabarmati. Besides, it is working on a mega project to make river Yamuna clean.
“Presenting the budget, the Finance Ministry has forgotten to allocate funds for cleaning of river Yamuna. There is no provision in the Union Budget for cleaning of Yamuna. We were expecting some funds but this Budget has disappointed us,” said environmentalist Manoj Mishra of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, an NGO. Mishra said that the Government has allocated funds for development of riverbed but this does not mean that the funds will be used in cleaning of river water.
The present state of the Yamuna is alarming. Yamuna is now described as a huge sewage canal, unfit for human consumption. It cannot even support bacteria or aquatic life. In the past 25 years, Government agencies have spent over Rs 2,000 crore to clean up many Indian rivers. The latest report of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), however, candidly admitted that the two great rivers — Ganga and Yamuna — continue to flow dirty. Although, a hefty amount has been spent on cleaning the drains that lead to the rivers by putting in sewage treatment plants (STPs) and sanitation facilities, unfortunately no improvement is noticed in the overall situation. The pollution load, however, continues to increase.
The Yamuna, as it meanders through Delhi over a 48-km stretch, picks up huge quantities of chemical wastes and toxins as also more than 225 million gallons of untreated sewage every day before leaving Delhi. When it enters Agra, the river is overloaded with additional discharges from industrial clusters in Faridabad, Ballabhgarh, Palwal and Mathura. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) monitors the water quality of Yamuna in Delhi and it is graded in the severely-polluted category, fit only for recreation, aesthetics, and industrial cooling.
The stretch of Yamuna that flows through Delhi contains 7,500 coliform bacteria per 100cc of water. The same stretch of the river picks up every day five million gallons of industrial effluents, including about 1,25,000 gallons of DDT wastes.