Google +

Add This

Bookmark and Share

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Ganges unfit for bathing RASHME SEHGAL DC | NEW DELHI


Link




q PLANNING COMMISSION REPORT SAYS WATER QUALITY IS POOR One of the holiest pilgrimage sites, Devprayag, has a faecal coliform (FC) count that fails to meet standard bathing requirements.
The Ganges river remains in drastic need for resuscitation. The Planning Commission (PC) has prepared a report on the water quality data of the river for 2008-09 and found that despite crores being pumped in to revive the river, its Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) fails to meet even standard bathing requirements
One of the holiest pilgrimage sites, Devprayag, has a faecal coliform (FC) count that fails to meet standard bathing requirements the report notes
The Supreme Court had asked the Planning Com mission, in response to a petition filed by environmentalist lawyer M.C
Mehta in 2007, to verify if the funds allocated to the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) had been spent effectively
The report prepared under the supervision of Dr Kirit Parekh, former member, regretted that the BOD levels in eight of the 16 cities monitored had continued to rise. Similarly, in UP, the faecal coliform (FC) count in 12 cities had shown a substantive increase in 2007-08 over 2002. Of the 10 cities monitored in Uttarakhand, only in Rishikesh and Haridwar did the FC count show acceptable levels for bathing
The situation was worse in Bihar and West Bengal, the report noted
The execution of the GAP has led to some improvement in that 3,750 million litres of sewage is being treated per day, but the PC highlights that the sewage treatment plants (STP) are presently meeting only 52 per cent of the needed capacity in 2008.

No comments: