India’s pollution is out of control and rivers are dying.
As an example: three billion liters of waste are pumped into Delhi's Yamuna River each day.
Like many rivers in India, New Delhi's body of water is little more than a flowing garbage dump, with fully 57 percent of the city's waste finding its way to the Yamuna. Cascades of garbage on its banks, makes it unaccesable and smells to hell. Most rivers also Mutha and Mula in Pune are so contaminated they can hardly sustain marine life.
"The rivers are dead, they are just just has not been cremated
Fully 80 percent 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. A growing number of bodies of water in India are unfit for human use.
Much of the river pollution problem in India comes from untreated sewage. Samples taken recently from the Ganga River near Varanasi show that levels of fecal coliform, a dangerous bacterium that comes from untreated sewage, were some 3,000 percent higher than what is considered safe for bathing. Only 55 percent of the 15 million Delhi residents are connected to the city's sewage system. The remainder flush their bath water, waste water and just about everything else down pipes and into drains -- many of them open -- that empty into the Yamuna. Eleven of the 17 sewage treatment plants in the city are underutilized with a quarter of the plants running at less than 30 percent capacity. As it turns out, the city's decrepit sewage system is simply unable to deliver sewage to the plants. The lines are "silted and settled...and are corroded.
A further problem is presented by the sprawling slums of New Delhi that are unconnected to the system. The sewage from "1,500 unplanned colonies find its way into the drains and then into the river
There is little city residents can do. A confusing web of political appointees, civil servants, and weak elected officials with short term limits makes accountability almost impossible. At least eight separate agencies from the city, state and federal level oversee are handling the case, competing for funds.
And even in the most sophsticated areas as the industrial parks of Gurgaon you will find the most splendid new towers of the continent , directly aside of a wild wast dump ... and what is worse nobody seems to care.
Experts believe spending more money into building sewage diversion and treatment infrastructure is a waste of time. She calls for rethinking the entire pollution control paradigm, building small-scale waste treatment plants on a neighborhood scale and re-using the water locally.
And people stilla are forced to wash in the silty water, because there is no other water available.
