After repeated squabbles with the civic administration over desilting of the Mithi river, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has now sent an ultimatum to the BMC that it will be doing the desilting work this year for the last time.

Both agencies have been at loggerheads for the past seven years over the desilting of a six-km stretch of the Mithi river, resulting in a delay in desilting and waterlogging in areas around that patch.

Rampant dumping of scrap into the Mithi at Kurla has undone all the effort to de-silt the river. The residents of Kapadia Nagar, Kurla (West), complained that the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has started the work a bit too late to finish before monsoon. Besides, the work will only yield result if action is taken against scrap dealers who dump waste into the river. Like every year, this year too there are fears that the low-lying Kapadia Nagar complex, comprising around 750 flats in 24 buildings, will be waterlogged during monsoon.

MUMBAI: Satisfied with the performance of robotic multipurpose excavator to clean the nullahs, the BMC may go ahead and buy more of them. A decision on this is yet to be taken, but senior civic officials and the ruling alliance leaders expressed their satisfaction after seeing a demonstration of the same on Thursday.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has purchased a new robotic multi-purpose excavator machine for the desilting of major drains in the city, as well as the Mithi river. On Thursday, the sewerage operations department of the corporation demonstrated the machine’s operations for the first time. The excavator works as three machines — JCB, Poclain and the dredger — and is controlled by a single person in a cockpit. Since the machine takes care of all the work, even a crane is not required to lift the silt and dump it on the sides of the drains.

The growth of water hyacinth-like plants in Mithi river near the international airport in Andheri has turned the stretch into a breeding ground for mosquitoes, complain civic activists. While activists blame water blockage due to on-going construction of two bridges (Lathia Rubber and MTNL) over the river in Chimatpada leading to the plants’ growth, experts feel even the increasing pollution levels along this stretch has triggered the problem.

When the first set of detailed data from Census 2011, Houses, Households Amenities and Assets, was released a couple of weeks ago, there was much flinching at the fact that around half of all Indians still defecate in the open. The census data also showed that piped and treated drinking water is presently enjoyed by just a third of Indian households.

Now, the aim of providing sanitation and piped drinking water for all will demand increasing allocations. But the CSE report Excreta Matters: How urban India is soaking up water, polluting rivers and drowning in its own excreta shows that mere money just can’t solve the problem.

Indians know little about the water they use and the waste they discharge

Water is life, and sewage tells its life story. This is the subject of the “Citizens’ Seventh Report on the State of India’s Environment”, Excreta Matters: How urban India is soaking up water, polluting rivers and drowning in its own excreta. It has a seemingly simple plot: it only asks where Indian cities get their water from and where their waste goes. But this is not just a question or answer about water, pollution and waste.

If a new report is to be believed, India is swimming in its own sewage and turning its rivers into drains for its ever-expanding cities.

The Center for Science and Environment, a 22-year-old New Delhi-based advocacy and research organization, has just released its seventh report—this one entitled, “Excreta Matters: How urban India is soaking up water, polluting rivers and drowning in its own excreta.”

MUMBAI: The Mithi River Development Project Phase 2 is set to get a little more expensive. The civic administration has floated a Rs 1.15 crore proposal to allow the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) to check for the presence of rocks on the riverbed. The proposal will be tabled in the civic standing committee this week.

More than six years after it was proposed, the civic administration has now asked the Central Government to fund the Rs 1,675 crore Mithi River Project, with a view to ease the financial burden.

So far the the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the MMRDA have spent Rs 827 crore on the project.