Shri D. P. Tiwari of Ganga Mahasabha has been monitoring the water quality at Prayagraj during the Kumbh. He says that there has certainly some improvement. However, most of the improvement is due to the release of more water from Tehri Dam.
14 sewage drains are falling into the Ganga at Jhusi. Some sewage treatment efforts have been done on each of these drains. One technique adopted is Geo-Synthetic Tube as shown in Image 1.
Water released after the Geo-Synthetic Tube treatment can be seen in Image 2 below.
We can see in this image that treated water from Geo-Synthetic Tube technique is getting added to the dirty water flowing below. This shows that the treatment is inadequate because large amounts of untreated sewage continues to go into the Ganga. Further, these techniques are of temporary nature. Contract for running these plants has been only given up to April 2019. Secondly the capacity of these temporary plants is less than required. Much water is going untreated. Thus, we can see even during the Kumbh dirty “treated” water coming out of Salori Treatment plant in Image 3.
Similarly, dirty water coming out from Rajapur treatment plant is shown in Image 4 below.
In image 5 below we can see water from Rajapur Sewage Treatment Plant is still having a lot of foam which indicates inadequate treatment.
The conclusion is that while there is some improvement in the quality of water most of the improvement is due to release of more water from Tehri. The Sewage Treatment Plants installed at Prayagraj are of temporary nature of less capacity and are not doing a satisfactory job.
