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.

NEW DELHI: Ironical as it may be, DDA has no jurisdiction over a large part of the Yamuna floodplain located within Delhi. Consequently, while tonnes of construction debris is dumped along the Pushta Road in east Delhi, choking water bodies and generally making a mess of the riverbed in the heart of the city, DDA says it cannot take action as the land in question belongs to the UP irrigation department.

The Delhi Jal Board has been given the go-ahead to expand its sewerage system in the city. At a Jal Board meeting chaired by Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Thursday, several key projects were discussed and approved.

To lay a sewer network in the non-sewer areas of Delhi and trap the untreated waste that flows into the Yamuna, the Board has been given approval to spend Rs.135 crore for providing and laying sewerage system under the command of Ghitorni sub-zone.

This time it is not merely crying wolf! The Indian Gray Wolf, inhabiting scrub lands and the ravines along the banks of the Central Indian rivers, needs protection. The immediate threat to the Indian wolf ( Canis lupus pallipes ), found along the banks of the Yamuna, Chambal, Banas and Mahi rivers, is the destruction of its habitat due to sand mining, cultivation and levelling of the ravines.

Rise in Delhi's sewage treatment capacity to realise goal: Jal Board

The Delhi Jal Board has begun the New Year on an optimistic note. The water utility claims that by the end of 2012 the Yamuna's filthy state will have changed and Delhi will have a clean river.

The Jal Board claims that in the next four months the city's sewage treatment capacity will have increased by 100 MGD and the rehabilitation of trunk sewers will be complete, which means a considerable amount of untreated waste will not make its way into the river.

New Delhi: The ambitious interceptor sewage project that is being pitched as the ultimate solution to the Yamuna’s filth was finally inaugurated on Thursday. Work is expected to begin on Friday but the system, that entails construction of parallel channels along the three main drains in the city – Najafgarh, Shahdara and Supplementary, will finish only around the middle of 2014.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Thursday launched the Delhi Jal Board’s ambitious water pollution abatement project in Nangloi to clean up the Yamuna within three years. The interceptor sewer project aims to lay 60-km sewers parallel to Delhi’s three major drains — Najafgarh, Shahdara and Supplementary — at a depth of 20 to 60 feet and in sizes varying from 600 mm to 2,400 mm diameter. The parallel sewers will intercept about 135 minor drains and convey the waste to the nearest sewage treatment plant (STP). This will ensure that only treated sewage is discharged in to Yamuna.

India is getting assistance from Japan for a programme to cleanse the Yamuna river, Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said Monday.

In a written reply to a query in the Lok Sabha, Natarajan informed the lower house that the Japanese government would provide India a loan of over 32 billion yen for the third phase of the plan.

The Kaushalya Dam being constructed on Ghaggar river in Panchkula at a cost of Rs 217 crore will soon be made functional. Work on the project started in 2008 and it was to become operational by August 2010. The delay in construction has led to escalation of cost in project. “We are hopeful of making the dam functional soon,” said an officer at the Irrigation Department. The dam will provide drinking water to Panchkula and also check flash floods.