Protect rivers

Protect rivers

A bottom-up approach is key to conservation and cleaning efforts.
Even as the Uttarakhand high court recently declared Ganga and Yamuna rivers as living entities, bestowing on them legal rights of a person, an RTI query has revealed that the waters of the Ganga along Haridwar are not even fit for bathing. Tests were conducted at 11 locations in Uttarakhand over a distance of 294km along the river, taking into account four main indicators of river water quality ¬ temperature, dissolved oxygen, biological oxygen demand and coliform (bacteria). On most of these indicators the Ganga failed to meet acceptable standards, showing high levels of bio-pollutants and toxic materials.
There's no denying that rivers in India are highly revered. Considered as sources of life in a largely agrarian country, rivers have cultural, spiritual and religious connotations.
However, it is also a fact that physical protection of rivers in India is very poor. With greater industriali sation and urbanisation, rivers have increasingly become depositories of urban waste and industrial effluents. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP) has seen more than Rs 1,800 crore spent over three decades on cleaning the Ganga with little improvement. The current government intends to spend around Rs 20,000 crore over five years on the Namami Gange Project. But apart from minor variations on GAP, the new project offers more of the old focus on sewage treatment plants.
The problem with this top-down approach is that it fails to account for the lack of coordination among the various states through which rivers flow. In fact, coordination on this score is often mired in Centre state and state-to-state politics. Given this scenario, it would be far better to push a bottom-up approach where people living along rivers become primary agents of change. This is best exemplified by the case of a village panchayat in Kerala's Alappuzha district reviving the Kuttemperoor channel of the Pamba and Achankovil rivers. It's time to translate our reverence for rivers into actual conservation efforts.