Rivers of effluents today’s bane

Arun Deep Ahluwalia

Ex-HoD, Geology Department, Panjab University, Chandigarh

Water is and has always been our lifeline. Guru Nanak has rightly called it Paani Pita. Domestic sewage and untreated effluents from our industry threaten our rivers, groundwater and lakes. Agriculture and mining residues too are a huge hazard, giving us a huge logistic challenge. Pollution wars we accept without a fight. We are in a purification mindset and not a fight-it-out-at-source mindset.  

The water history

Water cannot be merely an academic issue even for a geologist; it has been a spiritual issue for mankind, a medium of origin and sustenance of life ever since four billion years when algae developed in the oceans and atmosphere started having oxygen.  Sun, the real Devta, made sure the ocean waters circulated around the planet up in the sky and poured down in plenty and carved out hill slopes and river valleys and filled up underground aquifers and topped up rivers and lakes. 

After multi-cellular organisms developed in the Cambrian oceans (around 560 million years ago), the first ever land plants developed in the Silurian period (460 million years ago). That marked the beginning of forest-rains interaction. Inbetween, there were periods when acid rains and fires rained down from the skies almost knocking out life at Permian-Traissic  (245 million years ago) and phasing out dinosaurs at the end of Cretacous (65 million years ago), but largely there was peace in the waters on the surface, in the skies and underground.  

Paradoxically, in our so-called modern times, through the waters, toxins have reached an infant's blood and a mother's breastfeed. Water has become the riskiest component of our lives. Scared of drinking water, man opts for bottled water, not caring what is bottled together with it and what dissolves into it from the plastics.

The slowly rotting plastics have spread across top soils, reducing permeability, forcing rainwater to flow across into the gutters. The forest cover is being eaten up by newer and newer colonies, and also, needlessly, the greenery is covered by concrete. More and more cities are facing the prospect of a shutdown due to water scarcity. States are fighting each other for river water politically and judicially. Neighbouring countries are unleashing water wars downstream, holding it up or releasing it in bad times.

From purity to pollution

The current monsoon story is not very old, at least the latest one. Soon after dinosaurs vanished and marine rocks of Subathu were being laid in the Himalayan sea, around 55 million years back, India, moving northwards, had already hit the Tibetan plate and the Himalayas, though much less high, had set the stage for the monsoons to trigger. Primitive mammals in the Indo-Gangetic plains saw pristine purity drinkable all over the region. All the water around the primitive man and his wild friends was genuine mineral water, unlike the spurious one we buy now. 

The rising Himalayas saw frozen waters flowing sluggishly in valleys as rivers of ice called glaciers. Around 10 million years back, when the Himalayas rose to their mighty heights, polar ice caps also developed on the two ends of the planet. 

Alas, the peace and tranquility was destined to not last. The fun came to an end. Man started off an industrial revolution a couple of centuries ago and knocked out over half of our forests. Planet was much more beautiful then. It may be indeed better much later after we are gone. We may spoil even oceans irretrievably, not merely by the plastic we dump there, but also by many a Fukushima as most of our nuclear reactors are in the tsunami-prone areas.

Environmental affluence all over mother earth was replaced in a big part by rivers of sewage and effluents and the age of pollution of waters kicked off. From water-positive, we graduated to sewage- and effluents-positive and our wetlands got threatened, drinkable water started getting scarcer and irrigation too was in trouble.  

Today’s scenario

Where are we today on the hydrological scenario? Pesticides and insecticides have invaded our soils and crops are full of slow poison. Organic farming is the only way to save our waters. But do we have the courage to think of a world with healthy waters? We must dare or else our extinction, much faster than of others, awaits us.

If we thought only the Bangalore lake had its waters full of toxic froth catching fire, we need to come from Rajpura towards Banur in Punjab to see our frothy rivulet bringing in untreated effluents from a liquor factory which has froth on the surface flying into the faces of the travelers crossing the bridge.

One may accept natural pollution like fluorine, selenium, uranium, but having industrial pollution illegally getting into our biological system is not acceptable. It is too serious a matter to be left to system managers. The public must save itself through persuasive action.

Environmental education seems to have miserably failed at the school level or else our little kids would have created the most effective sensitivity against water pollution and pushed the polluters to the brink. Democracy and education are the time-tested panacea against all pollutants and polluters. Water pouring down from the heavens must be harnessed. Future politics will be all around drinkable water and water suitable for irrigation. Having sewage-irrigated vegetables is a fast-track to doom. A huge terrain of our vegetable fields is sewage-irrigated.

Everybody needs healthy water. No one can buy it. Constant vigil is the price for healthy, life-giving, life-saving water. All progress in space, nuclear power, IT will go to dogs if education and democracy do not protect the waters given by Mother Nature.