India stinking!

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Delhi twelve years, she was so “disgusted” with “dirty Delhi” that she complained to the then Prime Minister, Mr Inder Kumar Gujral, at a state banquet that India’s capital was one of the dirtiest cities she had visited.

Asked to explain what she had meant by “dirty”, a senior official from the British High Commission responded by explaining that the Queen was referring to “people easing themselves in public.”

An upset Mr Gujral, along with the then President K.R. Narayanan, were photographed the following morning, brooms in their hands, cleaning a street outside Rashtrapati Bhawan. The gesture amounted to sheer tokenism. Little has changed since then, or why would the environment minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh, have lashed out with his comment on India deserving a Nobel prize for filth?

A recent Forbes magazine survey has rated Mumbai and Delhi among the 25 dirtiest cities in the world.

Indians have traditionally prided themselves on keeping their homes clean even if their cities remain grubby. The Hygiene Council, a global initiative that brings together experts in the area of public health, has punctured India’s self-pride. A survey across eight nations had Indian homes being ranked amongst the dirtiest in the world. Also, 50 per cent of Indian homes do not have toilets and people continue to defecate in the open, according to a United Nations survey.

A dynamic district commissioner in Tikamgarh in Madhya Pradesh took it upon himself to build a series of toilets in several villages under his jurisdiction. On his next visit there, where this writer had accompanied him, the officer found the toilets being used as cattle sheds while the villagers continued to defecate in the open.

People’s homes apart, India is projected to be losing 4.5 per cent of its annual GDP because of environmental problems. In Chennai, six of the top ten causes of death are related to respiratory diseases which are rising 30 per cent per annum in the larger cities, said Dr D. Ranganathan, director in-charge of the Institute of Thoracic Medicine.

The effects of air pollution are being felt in many areas. Rice crop yields in southern India are falling as brown clouds block out more and more sunlight. And the brilliant white of the Taj Mahal is fading to a sickly yellow.

As a result of the rising filth, 80 per cent of urban waste in India ends up in the country’s rivers, and unchecked urban growth across the country combined with poor government oversight means the problem is only getting worse. India’s holiest rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, are dying due to unchecked pollution. The Centre for Science and Environment , which regularly monitors the quality of Yamuna water, maintains that between 75 to 80 per cent of the river’s pollution is the result of raw untreated sewage. Yamuna’s frothy brew has become so glaring that it can be viewed on Google Earth.

The Ganga’s fate is no different. Between Kanauj and Varanasi, industrial runoffs, pollutants, garbage and untreated sewage has this lifeline end up being little more than a dirty drain.

Mr Jairam Ramesh admitted in the just-concluded session of Parliament that the Centre has already spent Rs 817 crore on cleaning the Ganga and another Rs 1,306 crore on the Yamuna but had little to show for it.

The World Bank has agreed to provide multi-billion dollar assistance in conserving the Ganga river basin though activists feel there needs to be much greater accountability in the way the money is spent.

What is the reaction of the aam aadmi to a life surrounded by pollution? He believes that the government needs to take firm steps and not allow itself to get mired in corruption as millions of rupees are being siphoned away in the name of cleaning up our cities and rivers.

Environmentalists cite the example of how the citizens of Kanpur launched an agitation, insisting that the Kanpur State Pollution Welfare Board be allowed to file an FIR against the municipal corporation for dumping untreated sewage into the Ganges. No action has been taken on the ground.

This new paradigm for waste disposal must be a cradle-to-grave approach with responsibility being shared by many stakeholders, including product manufacturers, consumers and communities, the recycling industry, trade, municipalities and the urban poor.

It is now an established fact that consumption, linked to per capita income has a strong relationship with waste generation. As India’s per capita income rises, more savings will be spent on goods and services, which in turn will generate more waste. Growing urbanisation will see a parallel increase in the concentration of waste from which we will have no escape.

Dirty FACTS

Sewage
India produces 200,000 tonnes of waste water every day.

3 billion litres of waste being dumped in India's rivers per day

* Hyderabad: 1,100 million litres of generates sewage per day.

* Chennai: 486 million litres per day of sewage, 90% of it is treated

E-Waste

Electronic Waste: 1,300 tonnes per day, 4,75 lakh tonnes a year

* Hyderabad: About 16 tonnes per day, 6,000 tonnes a year.

* Chennai: 14,000 tonnes of e-waste in a year. CDs and tapes constitute 2,800 tonnes, mobile phones, 47 tonnes.

Air Pollution
* Delhi: 350 micro-grams per cubic metre.

* Mumbai: (Andheri) 542 microgrammes per cubic metre.

* Hyderabad: 435 microgram per cubic metre.

* Chennai: Over 300 microgram per cubic metre.