Even after five decades of enacting a law, India is nowhere close to preventing industries from dumping untreated toxic effluents in the open
A nickel-plating unit in Focal Point locality of Ludhiana, Punjab. Private firms are involved in transporting effluents from industrial units to common effluent treatment plants. But there are allegations that the trucks dump the effluents in the open India has a robust framework to arrest the discharge of untreated industrial effluents into waterbodies. The country enacted the Water (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act way back in 1974, which deems polluting waterbodies a criminal offence. In 1986, the country came up with the Environmental (Protection) Act, which provides the standards for effluent discharge. Since then, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has from time to time issued several guidelines to update the mechanisms to arrest water pollution. Has this helped?
The fact is no one knows. Even 50 years after the Water Act was brought into force, the country does not have consolidated data for two crucial parameters related to industrial effluents: how much of it gets generated and how much is treated. What is available is scattered information with major data gaps (see ‘Missing numbers’).
The latest data on effluent generation and treatment is available in the 3rd Quarterly Report of the Central Monitoring Committee set up by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to check river pollution. The report, submitted to NGT on February 12, 2021, however, does not provide a holistic picture. It has both the generation and treatment data for 13 states and Union Territories (UTs), and only generation data for another 10 states and UTs. For six states—Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Goa and Manipur—no data is available. “It is surprising to see that state pollution control boards (SPCBs) of large states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh are not furnishing information. The 13 states that have shared data related to effluent generation and treatment capacity should have also shared information on the quality of effluent discharge,” says Nivit Kumar, programme director, Industrial Pollution at Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
This is when CPCB, along with SPCBs and pollution control committees (PCCs) for Union Territories are legally obligated to disseminate consolidated information on wastewater generation, treatment and disposal under Section 16 (f) of the Water Act. It reads: CPCB must “collect, compile and publish technical and statistical data relating to water pollution” and “prepare manuals, codes or guides relating to treatment and disposal of sewage and trade effluents and disseminate information connected therewith”. All industries need to get the consent for establishing and operating units from SPCBs/PCCs and to get these consents, they need to furnish their effluent details. The consent to operate also needs to be revised every three years. Besides, SPCBs/PCCs need to regularly carry out inspections: quarterly for grossly polluting industries (such as sugar and textile, bleaching and dyeing industries), bi-yearly for high-polluting red category industries (such as lead acid battery and automobile manufacturers) and annually for orange category industries.
Down To Earth (DTE) spoke with members from several SPCBs and they all maintain that inspections are conducted regularly. The problem, though, lies in the quality of the inspections. In Zira town, Punjab, farmers had to protest for over three years against Malbros International, a liquor industry, that managed to get a clean chit from Punjab SPCB despite illegally releasing untreated effluents into the groundwater. Finally, the residents moved court which asked experts from CPCB to conduct groundwater tests. The central agency, in its report submitted last month, found that the distillery had illegally installed six borewells and four piezometers. Even the samples collected from 29 spots in and around the factory between February 22-24, 2023 are so polluted that the CPCB has directed Punjab SPCB to provide alternate source of water in the area.
Similarly, on September 30, 2020, NGT, while hearing a case of untreated effluent discharge in Vapi Industries in Gujarat, ordered upgradation of all laboratories and recognition under Environment Protection Act, 1986. “CPCB may assist and monitor all the states for compliance with these directions. The steps in this regard should be initiated and completed as far as possible within six months,” it had said. On February 2, 2021, NGT, in the case, observed that there are “serious deficiencies in the functioning of the statutory regulators and in remedial action against violations of waste management systems”.
Gross violations can also be seen in the continuous effluent quality monitoring system (CEQMS) used for real-time water pollution monitoring. In 2014, CPCB made it mandatory for all grossly polluting industries and common effluent treatment plants to install CEQMS. On February 22, 2017, the Supreme Court ordered that the CEQMS data must be available online within six months to increase transparency in pollution reporting and improve industry compliance.
DTE analysed the CEQMS dashboards on May 20, 2023, and found that of the 35 SPCBs/PCCs, only 23 were displaying data on their websites. No data was available for Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andaman and Nicobar, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Manipur, Nagaland and Sikkim. West Bengal’s CEQMS dashboard is password-protected. Further, widespread non-compliance was found across the 23 active CEQMS dashboards. The dashboards provide information industry-wise, and on a large number of the industry pages that DTE accessed at random, data was not available. Even the data from the flow meter, a sensor that monitors the amount of treated effluent that leaves the industry, was missing in the majority of the industries. In the absence of the flow metre data, the claims made by the industry are taken at face value.
One of the reasons for the poor compliance could be the fact that pollution control boards remain grossly understaffed. On April 3, 2023, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Union Minister of State for Environment, Forestry and Climate Change, in a reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, admitted that 33 per cent of the 577 sanctioned posts in the CPCB are vacant. The situation is worse at SPCBs, where over 49 per cent of the 11,103 sanctioned posts are vacant. Even PCCs need to hire people for 49 per cent of the 853 sanctioned posts. “Staff crunch is a chronic problem across pollution control boards and this has a direct impact on their ability to penalise defaulting industries,” says Kumar.
Experts point out that the Water Pollution Act needs to be updated to bring in transparency. The Act does not explicitly say that data should be made public. As a result, the effluent data is available only through the submissions made in court orders and Parliament questions. In fact, several state officials that DTE interacted with said that the raw data is available with them, but they do not inventorise it as it is not required under law. In contrast, data availability in the public domain is mandatory for pollution streams such as plastics, biomedical waste and municipal solid waste, where the rules have been recently passed.
Until the country arrests the untreated discharge of industrial effluent, it will not be able to clean its rivers and waterbodies. In fact, treated wastewater can be used for wide-ranging industrial and agricultural applications. The country already has the basic legal framework and processes in place to achieve the target. What is now required are certain changes in the way they are implemented.
Here are some recommendations by experts at CSE:
Need actionable data: India needs consolidated figures on effluent generation, treatment and discharge quality. Raw data is already available with SPCBs/PCCs. Now, the state boards need to inventorise the data so that it can be used for better policymaking. Industries should be graded as per their water consumption and effluent discharge, and then placed on a map to indicate their location. This will bring in transparency to the entire process.
Localised insights: India has a large number of small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) that play a major role in the country’s GDP. State governments in consultation with SPCBs/PCCs should map suitable locations for such industries. Scattered distribution of such industries make monitoring and inspection difficult, prompting them to illegally dump effluents.
Widen net: SPCBs/PCCs are allowed to rope in various stakeholders to develop a compre-hensive programme for prevention, control and abatement of water pollution and for improved compliance. Unfortunately, SPCBs/PCCs are only obsessed with licensing of industry and source inspection, neglecting its advisory role as envisaged under the Water Act, 1974.
Improve compliance: The poor perfo-rmance and non-compliance of common effluent treatment plants (CETP) has been a recurring problem that has been highlighted in several NGT cases. The 2021 Central Monitoring Committee report observes that 30 per cent of the CETPS are non-compliant. Part of the problem lies in heterogeneous characteristics of effluent received by CETP, which does not match the designed characteristics of CETP. To ensure homogeneity of effluent, every industry should adopt some effluent pre-treatment facility before discharging the wastewater into CETP to prevent shock loads.
This was first published in the 1-15 June, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth
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