Cleaning up the Ganga: What More is Required?

M. Dinesh Kumar, Ambili Ramdas, Niranjan Vedantam, Sofie van Ermen, Paul Campling and Saikat Mandal

Though the ‘Ganga Action Plan’ to clean up the Ganges river is several decades old, the river system started receiving global attention in the year 2014, with the new national government making ‘Ganga cleaning’ a major priority area in its political agenda. Though pollution of rivers like the Ganga is a very complex issue, with strong physical, ecological, climatic, socioeconomic, cultural and behavioural factors acting as key determinants, the entire attention of the academic and research community, development professionals and government executives and policy makers working on the Ganges is on building sewerage systems, setting up sewage and effluent treatment plants, plastic waste removal from the rivers and community awareness. This is producing great results. The world attention is now on the Ganga River. We are able to collect and treat a large proportion of the municipal waste being generated in the cities and towns located inside the Ganga basin. Several innovative technologies are being introduced not only for treating the wastewater but also for collecting the millions of tons of solid waste entering the River.

Unfortunately, very little attention has been paid to ‘non-point’ and dispersed pollution from agriculture, and from domestic uses in urban and rural areas where sewerage networks do not exist. So is the reduction in pollution assimilation caused by hydrological alterations due to dam building and water diversion. This is in spite of the fact that the report produced by the Consortium of several premier technical institutions from India including several IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) in 2014 for the Ministry of Jal Shakti did recognize non-point pollution from agriculture as a major threat to the water ecology of the Ganga. It is quite obvious that such a technology-centric approach can be unsustainable in the long run. The reason is quite simple. We are not doing enough to bring about behaviour change among those who pollute the natural water system.  The polluting agents need to be dis-incentivized against actions that generate wastewater.

In a recent study under a project called ‘Pavitra Ganga’ (Title: Unlocking wastewater treatment, water re-use and resource recovery opportunities for urban and peri-urban areas in India) being implemented by a Consortium of 14 research institutions and private companies from Europe and India and supported by the Department of Biotechnology of Govt. of India and European Commission, we attempted a more holistic and integrated approach to water quality management of the Ganga. It took a departure from the traditional approach of merely looking at technologies for treating the wastewater and its safe disposal in the river, which offers poor economic viability. It considered the hydrological and ecological integrity of the basin. This basically meant giving adequate attention to the quantum and pattern of surface water flows in different river stretches, vulnerability of groundwater to pollution, dynamics of surface water-groundwater interactions, i.e., return flows to and from the shallow aquifers--, and the several flow control structures in the basin, while devising strategies for water quality management.

Analyses of surface water quality of Ganga River and its tributaries at various locations in the basin with respect to a select chemical and biological parameters for two different time periods (2012 and 2020) show certain regional patterns. Serious water quality problems in terms of values of BOD, pH, nitrate, electrical conductivity and total coliform & faecal coliform count not conforming to permissible limits and low values of DO are witnessed only in the Western and South Western parts of the basin, including the parts falling in eastern Rajasthan, Southern Haryana, National Capital Region (NCR) and north-western Madhya Pradesh. While the quality of water generally improves towards the eastern parts of the basin, water quality is quite good in the upper Ganga basin (in Uttarakhand). On a temporal scale, from 2012 to 2020, areas representing high pH and high conductivity has increased, while area representing high BOD (7.0 to 21 mg/litre) has decreased. Area representing high DO content (5.0 to 9.8 mg/lit) has also decreased, while that representing lower DO content (1.35 to 5.0 mg/lit) had increased.

That said, from hydrological and water resources management perspectives, Ganga River system cannot be said to be clean unless we prevent the pollution of the vast aquifers underlying the river system that are hydraulically interconnected with the river system and the surface water flows. From an anthropocentric perspective, problems of pollution of Ganga River basin cannot be solved unless we solve the problem of groundwater pollution.

Further, it is not just the effluent and sewage discharged into the Ganga River and its tributaries that should be a matter of concern. Diffuse pollution from intensive agricultural activities including dairy farming is a serious problem in the Ganga basin posing a significant threat to the extensive shallow aquifers underlying the basin. We should not forget the fact that these aquifers are major sources of drinking water supply for hundreds of millions of rural and urban households in the basin area. The runoff from crop land and dairy farms also pollute the rivers. The intensive and extensive paddy cultivation in the basin--covering around 16-17 m. ha--, poses the biggest challenge as paddy wetlands are a major source of recharge of groundwater and the deep-percolating water rich in nutrients contaminate the groundwater while replenishing it.

We must recognize that the current approach to pollution control and water quality management has a few inadequacies. First: the polluting industries are not incentivized to reduce pollution levels on a sustainable basis in the effluents they discharge, but instead are under obligation to comply the effluent discharge norms set by the regulatory body. As regards the urban local bodies, they are not under any legal obligation to reduce pollution load, but act only on civil society pressure, provided government assistance is available. Second: there are several polluting industries in the basin that are small and dispersed, and monitoring their activities is an insurmountable task and hence the enforcement of pollution control norms on these units is poor. Third: there is no mechanism currently in place to detect and control non-point pollution. Fourth: WWT systems are economically unviable under the current socioeconomic and institutional setting. In sum, the institutional alternatives for pollution control and water quality management are not fully explored.

Probably India can learn more from the European Union states on what needs to be done to address this serious gap. In the EU, the institutional regime that govern water quality management decisions is very strong and effective due to the seriousness that is attached to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive by the member states. A system of disincentives for wasteful use of water and wastewater generation and discharge works through resource tax (covering the resource depletion cost and resource degradation cost) and pollution tax in many EU states. The institutional and policy environment that exist in the EU states support the adoption of wastewater treatment technologies by the industries and urban local bodies, or generate resources through taxes for investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure by independent agencies.

That said, there are several technical and institutional measures that could, in the short term, be implemented to significantly reduce pollution in the Ganga basin. To start with, we need to identify areas that are most vulnerable from the point of view of ‘non-point pollution’. Cash incentives need to be provided to the farmers (including dairy farmers) to reduce the nitrogen and phosphate load on land in such areas, if they are able to limit the use of these nutrients on their agricultural land to a pre-determined level worked out on the basis of several factors that determine the groundwater pollution risk from agriculture such as soil hydraulic properties, depth to groundwater level and rainfall. This will be an enormous task of monitoring land use and livestock holding, given the several millions of farmers operating in the basin. Holland has done remarkable work on control of nitrate pollution of groundwater from farming. We might be able to learn a few lessons from that country.

For treatment of wastewater, efficient and effective treatment technologies including the natural treatment technologies need to be explored, with due consideration to the climatic and environmental conditions, while greater emphasis needs to be laid on operation and maintenance of the existing treatment plants and the upgradation of those that are obsolete and inefficient. Heavy duty industrial water users need to be taxed to cover the resource cost and the resource degradation cost (the latter if they pollute the environment). Though researchers have been writing about these issues since the late 1990s, so far no institutional responses are forthcoming from the state and national governments.

In urban areas, volumetric pricing of water is necessary to affect conservation behaviour and cost recovery. At the same time, the sealing of private wells that are used for drinking water supply in housing colonies should be made mandatory to make sure that the effort is successful in bringing down the water consumption. Further, the urban local bodies need to include the wastewater treatment costs in the water charges levied from the municipal water users. The hundreds of small-scale industries that cause serious pollution need to be taxed on the basis of some simple criteria to avoid the huge transaction cost of monitoring & enforcement. The revenue generated through this can be used for investing in Common Effluent Treatment Plants. At the same time, the large industries whose environmental performance goes beyond compliance of the effluent discharge norms need to be offered tax incentives. 

Nature-based solutions need to be explored for treatment of wastewater such as the use of wetlands for wastewater treatment wherever the conditions are favourable, and the same can be combined with fisheries to improve the economic viability which is a concern in the Ganga basin. Lastly, there are many large reservoirs meant for irrigation and hydropower generation existing in the basin, mostly in the southern parts (in Bundelkhand region) and some in the northern part (in Uttarakhand) and a few in the eastern parts. In addition, there are many large barrages existing in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. The releases from these reservoirs and barrages can be manipulated to augment the downstream flows and to mitigate the ecological degradation of the river. But this will be possible only through sustainable reduction in the consumptive water use in irrigation command areas. 

To conclude, the cleaning of Ganga is not just about treatment of sewage and effluent that enters the surface water bodies and land, but also about preventing pollution of both surface water bodies and groundwater. It is as much about creating incentive and disincentive mechanisms through market instruments and regulations as about exploring various innovative treatment technologies. The basic aim of using such instruments is that the efforts at water conservation and pollution reduction result in direct economic benefits. In a very large river basin with remarkable regional variation in water resource endowment and having several flow-regulating structures, regional water allocation has to receive as much emphasis in pollution assimilation.

About the authors: M Dinesh Kumar, Ambili Ramdas, Niranjan Vedantam and Saikat Mandal are with Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad. Sofie van Ermen and Paul Campling are with VITO, Belgium. The views expressed in this article are personal and not that of the institutions that the authors are affiliated to. Email: dineshcgiar@gmail.com.