2010 was a tremendous year for PGI. One of great success, trial, tribulation and moreover learning. With our objectives fixed and our reach growing, we accept the challenge of making the largest impact in 2011. As many of our followers may have noted, PGI has focused its paradigm to focus on what PGI has determined to be the greatest challenges to India and global humanity. Food and water. So simple a mission objective, but with a depth of complexity that seems endless. PGI's dedication to assisting clients design and implement agribusinesses that adhere to the UN Millennium Goals Global Compact is a heightening of the bar. However these are times wherein we haven't the convenience of time. Change must occur and quickly. Economic parity in India and in other developing nations is an urgent and greatly invisible crisis that is rapidly reaching cataclysmic proportion. PGI issued a statement in June 2010, that "2011 will be the year that India's economic rise will collide with the immovable object of wide-scale ecological and food security services collapse." The statement is not flippant. It is based on PGI's years of research, ground data and observed trends reported by the scores of experts PGI has consulted in providing services to its clients and initiatives.
The PGI Eco-Logical Fox Initiative (ELF) of developing and implementing sustainable Global Compact enterprises in the areas of scaled agribusiness development hit the ground running this month with its latest designed-for-purpose turnkey company Surabhi Bamboo for Sales Service Company, Chennai. The model will be highlighted by PGI at the United Nations Global Compact National Conference in Hyderabad on February 7, 2011. It is our most ambitious design and facilitation to date and we thank Sales Service Company for its vision and allowing PGI to design the Surabhi Bamboo business to exacting social and environmental standards. Surabhi Bamboo is India's first fully integrated produce-process-consumer commercial level agribusiness that has applied-by-design all metrics of the Global Compact principles. With a built in system of CSR output monitoring, Surabhi aspires to demonstrate on scale the new normal business model of 21st century CSR.
To punctuate the critical nature of PGI's decision to focus its professional services attention to areas in greatest need of change, Below are two articles from Times of India related to the massive inflation that is deepening the chasm between those who have been beneficiary of India's economic boom and those who have been left out. In a country where malnourishment continues to score among the highest in the world, and the incredible economic, social and cultural pressures on single and marginalized mothers to provide for their children, it is a situation that needs immediate address and rapidly implemented change. PGI is certain that the Government cannot be relied upon to incentivize the problem away...only ground level changes of thinking and systems can produce the shift needed to come back from the brink. The irony of India is that it leads the world in the development of sophisticated IT for which all the world enjoys. The brand India- larger than life- eclipses a real and present crisis of the most base and unsophisticated of human security needs...food and water.
As part of PGI's COP for United Nations, and its dedication to being a staunch advocate and contributor to Global Compact business implementation on scale, PGI will publish weekly its synopsis of each of the 10 GC principles as it relates the the state of affairs in India. Each installment will digress re PGI's on-the-ground initiatives for change; highlight how our clients assure they are setting and meeting goals for change; and outline plans of action that have been shown to be vehicles of paradigm shift in each of the 10 principle areas.
So join us on the odyssey that is 2011, and please feel free to contribute in anyway to PGI's depth of understanding and network by sharing your thoughts, experiences and know-how. PGI's network has from the beginning has been about cross-cutting and connecting verticals that create real synergy and apply to real solutions.
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TIMES OF INDIA Jan 13, 2010
Washed away by OUR SINS
Nitin Sethi
TNN
Geetika Narang walks around Connaught Place in Delhi, asking random people two simple questions: “Where do you get your water from and where does your shit go?” She is assisting Pradip Saha make a documentary: Faecal Attraction. It’s on the death of the Yamuna.
“My water? I guess, from Yamuna,” says a slightly embarrassed man caught by a TV camera. “And the shit?” Geetika persists. “Hmm, there only,” he says, as he shies away from the question. Most others are less sure. “Hain, shit? I don’t know, man, all of that happens automatically, I don’t know.’’ “Goes in the air.’’ “Goes into water.’’ “How do I know where it goes from the sewer?’’ Geetika records some of the answers and laughs over them later. But where does it really go? Most of it flows directly into our water systems. India generates a massive 38,000 million litres of sewage every day. Even for the record, the government has the capacity to treat only about 12,000 million tonnes, that’s less than one third of the muck. The 35 metropolitan cities of India alone produce 15,644 million litres of sewage daily.
In Delhi, where the government has over the decades spent the maximum amount of resources to clean the Yamuna, 40 per cent of the mess generated flows untreated into the river. The Supreme Court may have been seized of the matter for a decade but nearly half of the population in the Capital does not have a sewage system and the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna remains the most polluted river section in the country. According to the National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3), conducted in 2005-2006, a mere 26 per cent of rural India has sanitation. The urban sanitation coverage is 83.2 per cent and the all-India coverage is an abysmal 44.6 per cent.
So this is what we do — load water systems close by with our sewage and then go further out to get water. And because water in the backyard is too dirty, we either dig underground or draw it from a source far up in the hills. Water for Delhi, for instance, comes from the Ganga and Beas rivers 400 km away. It is piped all the way to fulfill the need of millions in its unending sprawl. Bangalore has to get it from the Cauvery 90 km away and Hyderabad from the Krishna 116 km away. It costs 10 times more than we pay in some cases. But someone does pay, upstream or downstream of us.
The end result: we slowly kill our rivers, literally throttle them, even as the groundwater keeps depleting at a matching pace. In the hills, we dam the rivers — drawing water for irrigation, power and direct use. Downstream, once the river hits the plains, it becomes a dumping ground. It’s a double whammy for the river and a tragedy for the people who live along it. Degrading catchment areas make it worse. With the reduction in forests and the disappearance of natural recharge zones in the mountains, less and less water seeps into the rivers. In fact, almost all Indian rivers seem to be going through these calamitous changes. Large stretches of key rivers have become so polluted that they are not even safe to bathe in.
Take the case of the Sutlej, in which tonnes of dead fish were recently found floating on the surface, their underskin darkened, bellies putrid. This occurrence has, shockingly, recurred in the past four years in what once used to be the lifeline of the state. Industrial pollution, clearly, has taken its toll. Punjab witnesses major aquatic mortality in the rainy season because industries store their potent and untreated water in huge pits and, under the cover of the monsoon and flash floods, release the toxic waste into the river. Skin diseases are common among people who come in contact with the water.
It’s just the details that change as one looks across the country at the health of Indian rivers. In the industrial area of Bengal’s Burdwan, the Banka river, which runs parallel to the Damodar, has lost its navigability over the years, thanks to silting, dumping of city waste and polyethylene. During the colonial era, Banka was a drinking water source for Burdwan. But now, many points on the river are choked by brickfields and rice-mill waste.
In Maharashtra, five of the 20 notified rivers — Godavari, Tapi, Bheema, Krishna-Panchganga and Wainganga — are facing danger, reveals a survey done by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. While waste water discharge has increased manifold in the Godavari, at Panchavati in Nashik the construction of a dam at Gangapur has significantly reduced the dilution and selfpurification capacity of the river. “If the Godavari river is exploited further, it can die soon,” says a chief engineer with the Maharashtra irrigation department. Mumbai’s Mithi river is now a drain, but historians and naturalists remind us that there was a time when tigers from the forested area ventured out for a sip. Elsewhere in the state, several perennial rivers have either shrunk or become seasonal. Environmentalist Dilip Gode says rivers like the Kanhan, Kolar, Chudamani and Sitna were perennial until the early 1970s, but these days they dry up by February.
Turn south and the rivers flow no better. The meandering course of the Palar and its gurgling water was a lifeline for perennially rainstarved northern Tamil Nadu. But today, the water body is called the ‘lost’ river, vanquished by stinking effluents from leather tanneries lining its basin. And consider this for irony: the completely dry and woefully-polluted Palar bed and its once-fertile farms have now turned into a motor racing track. The tannery hub of Vellore, on the banks of the Palar, is now rated among the country’s most polluted spots.
If the Palar has ‘perished’ in northern Tamil Nadu, the textile export centre of western Tamil Nadu has turned the Noyyal river into a multi-coloured gutter. Tirupur’s textile units fetch over Rs 10,000 crore in foreign exchange every year, but the price for the exponential export growth, mostly over the last two decades, has been paid by the Noyyal, whose waters were once famed for being “sweet and tasty’’. Karnataka, too, is in trouble. “There is no dispute about the fact that the water level in the Cauvery has come down drastically,’’ says Dr P N Ravindra of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board.
Rivers are dead and dying in India with no plan for recovery or revival. And though the government has not sat idle, all its money seems to be lost in technical ‘solutions’ that fail miserably. “Rajasthan was a waterborne state,’’ says Magsaysay Award winner Rajendra ‘Waterman’ Singh. “About 200 years back, thousands of travellers would stop by Jaisalmer for a drink of water. But now it is totally dry, the result of doing away with the earlier system of community-driven water management. Now, the Maru Ganga, or the Luni river, is well on its way to getting lost in the desert trail. The river is near dead. Industrial pollution murdered it.’’
Nitish Priyadarshi, professor of geology and environmental science at Ranchi University, says rivers like the Argora and the Harmu have vanished in Jharkhand. Leading Damodar Bachao Adolan activist Saryu Rai says there’s a reason for this. “We have no authority that takes care of the rivers and regulates construction of dams.’’ Not that we don’t have a plethora of laws and regulations. There are wings of the central and state government obsessed with rivers. It’s just that they work at cross purposes or remain disconnected from each other. “For the state, the rivers have two purposes — to extract from (and store) and to dump into. A river with flowing fresh water has no value,” says Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People.
The trouble, primarily, lies in the disaggregated management of rivers. While the power and water ministries look at rivers merely as a source of hydropower and irrigation, the environment and forests ministry is concerned only with the quality of water. Then there is the urban development ministry, which wants to set up as many sewage
treatment plants and drinking water regimes as it can. The rural development ministry, too, has a sanitation target to pursue. Laws and regulations do not mandate that the entire gamut of projects on a river basin be tested for their cumulative impact on the river system and the people living near it. Each hydroelectric/irrigation scheme comes up for clearance at different levels — financial, environmental and technical. This piecemeal approach has inherent flaws.
So, even as sewage treatment facilities are being built downstream on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, dam proponents merrily plan to create dozens of reservoirs on the tributaries to the river, reducing its flow and making sewage treatment ineffective. “There is no basin-wide blueprint for our rivers,” says S V Suresh Babu, a Bangalore-based water policy expert. “There has to be a plan for the entire basin. A plan that says this is the carrying capacity of the river for extraction or for dumping. Or, for just leaving the river alone for a stretch.”
The first such attempt, though, has been made with the formation of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, where all the riparian states and various arms of the central government will sit together to plan a future course that will manage both the ‘quality and quantity’ of the river. But it’s a nebulous start — and with a river on which the government has already spent countless thousands of crores to clean up, with little or no result.
Thakkar points out that at the moment the government does not even mandate a minimum ecological flow to be maintained in the river basins. While an unbridled river would be ideal, with so many competing demands on the river basin, environmentalists suggest that rivers carry at least a minimal level of water that keeps the basic ecological functions alive.
Curiously, when Himachal Pradesh in 2007 passed a notification calling for such a minimum ecological flow in sections of the river flowing through the hill state, a power project developer opposed it in court and the environment and forests ministry (MoEF) came out in support of the developer, stating that the laws and regulations did not allow for such a direction.
“We have created this bizarre artifice of river management by drawing political boundaries over resources and waste,’’ says Pradip Saha. “We call the river water as ‘x’ state’s resource and the waste that flows into it as ‘y’ state’s mess. To keep a check on the health of Indian rivers, the basic unit of planning has to be the basin.” He wonders if five years from now he’ll be able to tell where water comes from and where waste disappears into. Nor would anyone else, unless a proper river management system is put in place. Everything, as they say, will continue to go down the drain. And as a mahant at Varanasi said, “Where will we go to wash our sins if the rivers dry up?’
(With reports from Yogesh Naik, Swati Sengupta, Radha Venkatesan, Ashish Roy, Balwant Garg, Priya Yadav, Yudhvir Rana, Anindo Dey, Jayashree Nandi, Sanjeev Kumar Verma)
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