By Sunita
Narain, Down to Earth, Jan 31, 2012
Illustration: Karno
Guhathakurta 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 does their waste go. But this is
not just a question or answer about water, pollution and waste. It is about the
way Indian cities (and perhaps other parts of the world that are similarly
placed) will develop. It is about the paradigm of growth that’s sustainable and
affordable.
Urbanisation
in India, relentless as it is, will only grow. How should the country manage
its water needs so that it does not drown in its own excreta? This is what the
Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has asked and tried to answer in the
book. What has amazed us is the lack of data, research and understanding of
this issue in the country. This is when water concerns all. People in cities
get water in their houses; they discharge waste; and they see their rivers die.
But they don’t make the connection, between flushing toilet and dying rivers.
It is as if they do not want to know. But they should.
Is this a
reflection of the caste system of Indian society, where removing waste is
somebody else’s business? Or is it a reflection of current governance systems,
where water and waste are government’s business, and within that the business
of a lowly water and sanitation bureaucracy? Or is it simply a reflection of
Indian society’s extreme arrogance—it believes it can fix it all as and when it
gets rich; that water scarcity and waste are only a temporary problem; that
once it gets rich, infrastructure will be built, water will flow and the
embarrassing stink of excreta in cities will just disappear.
It is
clear Indians know little about the water they use and the waste they
discharge. We at CSE had to collect data the hard way—city by city, ferreting
out the material from government offices, which are rarely visited by
researchers. The second volume—71 cities: water-excreta survey—of the seventh
citizens’ report puts together individual city profiles. Each city is mapped to
know more about its past, current and future water footprint. Each city is
mapped to know more about where the waste generated from such use of water
goes. It is a geography lesson that’s essential to learn.
It was
way back in the late 1990s that environmentalist Anil Agarwal, who conceived
and crafted the State of India’s Environment reports, had said one needs to
understand the political economy of defecation, where the rich are subsidised
to excrete in convenience.
Now when
we researched for this report, which explains the political economy of
defecation, we were struck by one fact that should make us all angry, really
angry. We found countless instances where a city’s drain, called nullah today,
was actually a river. Delhi residents are familiar with Najafgarh drain, which
discharges the city’s waste into the Yamuna. But most of them do not know that
this “drain” has its source in the lake Sahibi. Now Sahibi is gone, and what
has replaced it in living memory is a drain carrying only filth, not water.
Worse, New Gurgaon is now dumping its sewage into the same Najafgarh jheel
(lake).
Buddha
Nullah in Ludhiana is referred to as a drain because it is that—full of stench
and filth. But not so long ago Buddha was called darya (river). It was a clean
freshwater stream. One generation has changed its form and name.
The Mithi
is Maximum City’s shame. When floods drowned Mumbai in 2005, it learnt it had a
clogged drain called Mithi, marred by encroachments. It did not realise that
the Mithi had not shamed the city, the city had shamed the Mithi. This “drain”,
which originates near the city, is really a river. It was recognised as a
river. It flowed like one. But today even official environmental status report
calls this living river a storm water drain. One more city has lost its river.
These lost rivers are our collective shame.
