River clean-up act under close watch of NEERI

NASHIK: The civic administration would carry out the measures to reduce Godavari river pollution under the supervision of experts from the National Environment Engineering Research Institute (NEERI). The civic body would make efforts to reduce the biochemical oxygen demand in the river.
Experts criticized the civic officials during the Green Kumbh meeting for not following all the recommendations of the NEERI.They added that the administration should have informed the court if the recommendations were not practically possible to implement.
The meeting was chaired by revenue commissioner and attended by all the heads of the departments, the police and environment activists. The activists had knocked the doors of the Bombay HC to curb river pollution. They said NEERI had devoted an entire chapter on measures to curb the river pollution and the time had come to act.
“If the NEERI recommendations were not practically possible to implement, then the court should have been informed about it. It was discussed in the court two years ago that the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) in the river should be brought down from the present 30 to 10 as the water is unfit for human consumption. Nobody protested at that time,” said the petitioners.
Civic chief Praveen Gedam asked the NEERI to provide some members under whose supervision the civic officials could work to reduce river pollution. “The Centre has set the BOD of sewage treatment plants as 30. All our STPs are built to the efficiency of 30. Now, why are they asking us to reduce it to 10? The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has also approved our STPs. We will definitely try to bring it down as much as possible,” Gedam said.
Rakesh Kumar, chief scientist of NEERI, said it would not be possible for them to supervise the work daily but they would oversee the overall work and ensure that it is done well.
NEERI officials said reducing the BOD would not require too much space or money. They said rather than concentrating on the STP outlets, the number of outlets should be built at different places. The gradient (slope) should be minimized and sand filtration should be done before release.
“We did some testing in terms of how foam coming out of the STPs at Tapovan and Agartakli can be further treated and the foam reduced. Most of the flow has been diverted from nullahs to the STPs by the NMC, like the nullahs near Chopada lawns, the forest nursery,” said Kumar.
He said NEERI had suggested the natural method of treating polluted water like use of phytorid and that the pilot project had been done at Someshwar. Revenue commissioner Eknath Davle said, “We took the review of river pollution. I have instructed them to see to it that the STPs function in full capacity. All measures should be taken to control river pollution as per the directions of the high court.”