Kumbh: time to come clean

Maha Kumbh in Allahabad has perhaps no parallel in terms of the sheer size of the congregation. In less than two months over 100 million people are expected to come to this city, which sees the confluence of two rivers of India—the Ganga and the Yamuna. People come to worship on the banks of the Ganga.

Why excreta matters

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.

No let-off till zero discharge

A few years ago I wrote about a textile town called Pali, in Rajasthan, which had completely toxified its seasonal river Bandi with industrial discharge. Then, I said the real story was not about pollution but the anger of farmers whose agricultural lands were destroyed because of effluents, whose well water had turned poisonous, and whose fight led the town to set up the country's first common effluent treatment plant. The question I raised was did we know how to clean chemical pollution in water-scarce areas?

From water to water

Look out of the window the next time you travel by road or by train anywhere in India. Hit a human settlement, and you will see, heaps of plastic coloured garbage apart, pools of dirty black water and drains that go nowhere. They go nowhere because we have forgotten a basic fact: if there are humans, there will be excreta. Indeed, we have also forgotten another truth about the so-called modern world: if there is water use, there will be waste. Roughly 80 per cent of the water that reaches households flows out as waste.

Excreta's economy a true experience

Every society must understand how the excreta it produces is managed. It teaches us many things about water, about waste, about technologies to clean, economics and politics of who is subsidised to defecate in our societies. But, most importantly, it teaches us humility. We know so little about our own world. If we knew better, we would understand why we are failing to ensure our present and why we will all need to do things differently, if we want to safeguard our future.

Real India needs real answers

Pali is a textile town deep in water-scarce Rajasthan. It is well known for the cloth it produces. But it is even better known for the filth it also produces, best seen in the colours in its mostly dry river, the Bandi. Pali's pollution, and the protest of residents and neighbouring farmers, is part of the environmental movements of this country. The protests resulted in the setting up of a common effluent treatment plant, one of the first in India. This town has reinvented the polluter pays principle.

The nectar poison we drink

When Neena Khanna from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences called to tell us that her patient who lives in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh had high levels of arsenic in his blood, hair and nails, we were stunned. Why Ballia? We knew of arsenic in West Bengal and Bangladesh but not in Uttar Pradesh. What could be the reason?

The battle of the Indian bulge -- I

In Nagpur city, women gather outside a court. In broad daylight they lynch a local serial rapist. When four women are arrested, few hundred women own up to the crime. They say they killed Akku Yadav because the local police did little to stop his criminal reign of terror; they feared the court would release him and took matters in their hand. But why am I writing about vigilante killings?

Waste, by any other name...

An official of the state government was explaining, at a meeting, the progress made to set up sewage treatment plants, drains and diversionary sewers in pursuit of a Supreme Court order to clean up the Yamuna river in the northern end of Delhi city. A number of planned activities were complete. A lot of money was spent. Impressive. I asked a basic question: "What is the impact of all this on the quality of the river's water?" My question met with silence. Indeed, utter surprise. What did the two tasks have in common?