India and Water Pollution: A Murky Confrontation

India is outraged by the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which was released on World Environment Day (June 5), since it ranks last (180th).Denmark, often recognized as the world's most ecologically friendly country, leads the list.[1]

Government organizations in India have criticized this report harshly, calling it biased as one of many names to shield themselves. A stitch in time saves nine, so as the authorities work to debate?what the study got wrong, let's look at what the report makes us aware of.

Source:IndianExpress

Martin Wolf, the report?'s main investigator, emphasised that EPI is more than just a climate report. Wolf noted that the country rankings take into account air quality, water quality, agriculture, and fisheries. “Thus, India’s low score reflects poor performance across a variety of important environmental issues.” [2]

Following his lead, an overview of the condition of our water bodies and the degree of pollution speaks louder than the report.

Source:IBERDROLA

In recent years, India has experienced unprecedented urbanization and economic growth. This, however, has serious environmental repercussions. The country's rivers have become badly poisoned, with an estimated 70% of surface water unfit for drinking.[3] The illegal dumping of raw sewage, silt, and waste into rivers and lakes degraded India's waterways significantly. The near-complete lack of pipe planning and an ineffective waste management system aggravate the problem. Every day, 40 million liters of wastewater enter rivers and other bodies of water.[4] Only few of them are adequately managed because of a lack of adequate infrastructure.[5]

The extremely polluted state of some rivers in India were highlighted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), an environmental NGO that publishes annual reports based on data on environmental development gathered from public sources. In three of India's four river monitoring sites, heavy hazardous elements like lead, iron, nickel, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, and copper were found.

Source: NDTV

Around one-fourth of the monitoring sites dispersed across 117 rivers and tributaries found high concentrations of two or more dangerous elements. Ganga, which is the focus of the Center's Namami Gange project, exhibited excessive levels of pollutants at ten of Ganga's 33 monitoring stations, falling well short of the goals of the Center's lauded mission.[6]

India, a country rich in culture, must now humble itself and accept such assessments as the much-needed impetus to make the necessary adjustments, as many other countries have done in the past when presented with low EPI scores (including Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, South Korea, and China).[7]

Source:Ajjazeera

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