#dnaEdit: Legislation as solution

How do you save a river that supports nearly 400 million people, feeds nearly half of India’s irrigated area, and is saddled with nearly 6,000 million litres of sewage discharge daily? The NDA government appears to have come around to the establishment wisdom of a central legislation to save the Ganga. Continuing with the UPA government’s half-hearted push for such a law, the Centre’s proposed law aims to make it illegal to pollute the Ganga or obstruct its natural flow. The statutory route is also a recognition that past efforts to evolve consensus and effective collaboration to save the Ganga — the Ganga Action Plan Phase I launched in 1986, GAP Phase II (1995), and the National Ganga River Basin Authority (2009) — have failed. The logistics of the operation are daunting: they involve central water resources, pollution, and environment protection agencies working in tandem with five state governments and urban local bodies in 36 cities and dozens of other small towns along the Ganga’s banks.

Merely one-third of the total generated sewage is treated before reaching the Ganga and this untreated municipal sewage is responsible for 75 per cent of the pollution. Faecal coliform levels have reached unacceptable levels even in upstream areas. With urban populations increasing, ongoing efforts at capacity building by constructing sewage treatment plants (STPs) have continued to lag sewage generation by over 60 per cent every year. An inspection by the Central Pollution Control Board of 51 STPs along the Ganga found that nearly 30 per cent of them were not operational and nearly 40 per cent of the installed capacity lay unused. Reasons like power scarcity and civic bodies facing funds crunch have been cited. Moreover, 60 per cent of the Ganga’s water is diverted for irrigation. In the past, Ganga clean-up efforts spelt out an important role for central and state pollution control boards. But by foisting weak pollution control laws and denying them adequate financial resources or manpower, these boards have been turned into toothless bodies, which have failed to rein in local bodies or polluting industries. Any law that now comes into place will have to grapple with all these realities. Even as the Save Ganga efforts have moved from pollution-centric and town-centric approaches to holistic and basin-level strategies, there are institutional failures to be addressed. Without capacity-building and public participation at the local body and state-level, any number of technocratic solutions cannot succeed. 

All five states along the Ganga’s course are ruled by non-NDA parties. It is only natural that they would construe political motives in the Ganga rejuvenation project considering the BJP’s propensity to view the river as a religious and cultural idiom in its Hindutva project. Without their cooperation, however, the new efforts could fail and precipitate ecological disaster. Past funding on Ganga projects were miserly considering the health expenditure and loss of earnings on account of water-borne diseases. However, even this singular focus on the Ganga is riddled with contradictions. Shipping minister Nitin Gadkari has envisaged building barrages and bridges every 100 kilometres and tourism minister Shripad Naik wants to tap the river’s tourism potential by beautifying the river bank. Such measures impede the river’s natural flow. Soon after the US implemented the landmark Clean Water Act, 1972, that helped clean up many polluted rivers including the iconic Hudson, India enacted the toughly-worded Water (Prevention and Control of) Pollution Act, 1974, prescribing effluent sample collection, penalties and imprisonment. With past legislations ignored in letter and spirit, can new ones make a difference?