River cleanup: India 'has much to learn from S'pore'

By Y.p. Rajesh India Correspondent In New Delhi, The Straits Times, 5 Jul 2014

INDIA has much to learn from Singapore's river cleanup experience - although the size and scale of the problem in the two countries are different- for the basic task is the same, experts said.

India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made cleaning India's filthy rivers, particularly the holy Ganges, a key priority and has sought the help of the city state. Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam, who is visiting India this week, said the Republic is happy to share its experience.

Post by K Shanmugam Sc.

While details of this cooperation are yet to be worked out, experts said India needs to emulate the Singapore model of urban development and wastewater management as the discharge of effluents causes much of the pollution in the rivers.

"From Singapore's experience, we should understand that river cleaning is not an isolated task. It is intricately woven into your urban or rural set-up," said Mr Yugal Joshi, co-author of the 2013 book The Singapore Water Story: Sustainable Development In An Urban City-State.

"The first thing India has to realise is the value of water. In Singapore, they realised this very early when water was rationed during World War II," Mr Joshi, a former research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told The Straits Times.

Alarm bells over the pollution of Indian rivers have been ringing for some years now and India's pollution watchdog last year said water from half of the 445 rivers is unfit for direct human consumption.

Water at a quarter of the 1,275 monitoring stations was not good enough to even bathe in.

Experts said Indian cities and towns produce more than 40,000 million litres per day of domestic and industrial effluents and only about a quarter of this is treated before entering the rivers.

A 2013 joint report on water in India by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Unicef and the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies said the "time bomb of increasing water pollution is ticking" and the situation needs to be addressed soon.

"Water quality issues in India have reached an alarming proportion. There is no model in India that shows best ways to tackle... wastewater," the report said.

India has tried to address the problem in the past and even sought foreign help.

Technology and expertise from Europe were used to clean the Ganges and a deal was signed in 2010 for the Singapore Cooperation Enterprise (SCE) to restore the Cooum river in the southern city of Chennai.

But ineffective follow-up and execution have meant those plans did not make much progress.

SCE and Temasek Foundation have also been involved in sharing Singapore's experience in recycling and reusing wastewater in cities such as Delhi and Bangalore and experts said such efforts need to be expanded to other cities.

But there are issues that Singapore is unable to help with, such as rivers flowing through jurisdictions of several states, large populations and industries along their course and weak implementation of laws, experts said.

"What Singapore can do is give a broad guide map to tackle pollution. What we need to learn from Singapore is managing our city waste," Mr Joshi said.

"If we send better quality of waste into our rivers, it will solve half our problem."