Indian Express 06.01.2010
Sewage treatment project: condition of Mutha river to indicate success
Following the implementation of five projects for the treatment of sewage in the city, Pune Municipal Commissioner Mahesh Zagade has set the level of cleanliness of Mutha river water as the benchmark for deciding whether sewage treatment is complete.
“The PMC has set up new sewage treatment plants (STPs) at various places in the city. More projects to ensure 100 per cent treatment of sewage generated will come up over the next few years. At the end of the day, the best benchmark to measure the success rate of sewage treatment in the city would be the condition of the river water,” said Zagade.
Many STPs are being put in place and their capacity to treat a certain quantum of waste is merely statistics, he said. “It is the river water that speaks for the success in achieving our goal. If the water continues to be polluted then the civic administration has failed to achieve its goal,” he said. Zagade said that 20 per cent of the sewage generated does not reach the STPs due to leakages while 20 per cent gets treated locally. The STPs should be able to treat the remaining 60 per cent sewage generated in the city. “Therefore, the sewage treatment department has been asked to carry out an audit of the sewage to ascertain the actual sewage generated and treated through the existing system,” he said, adding that it was a long way in reaching the objective of 100 per cent treatment. The PMC is able to treat 300 million litres of sewage per day at its various STPs while the quantity generated is 700 MLD. We are proposing more STPs to achieve the objective of complete sewage treatment,” said V G Kulkarni, PMC development engineer (project).
He said that the civic administration is committed to treating all the sewage generated in the city and thereby keeping the Mutha river clean. “We will ensure that there is no discharge of sewage in Mutha river, but cannot do much if the river water is getting polluted even before entering the city,” Kulkarni said.
The civic chief is moving in the right direction going by the river water condition. A lot of capital investment is being made for setting up STPs,” said Sanskriti Menon of Centre for Environment Education (CEE). She said that the civic body might come up with a large number of STPs but the performance of the system can only be ascertained by gauging the quality of the river water.
Under JNNURM, the PMC is setting up STPs in Baner, Mundhwa, near Naidu hospital, Kharadi and Vithalwadi. The work of two STPs is complete while the others are near completion.
