The Ganges Clean-Up

Objective - To lower the level of river pollution in Ganges and bring the water quality to bathing standards as identified by the CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board). Description - The Ganges River which is about 2500 km long and covers about one-fourth of the country gets polluted by over 30 cities, 70 towns, and thousands of villages along its banks. Nearly all of their sewage goes directly into the river, along with thousands of animal carcasses. Also huge amount of industrial waste is added to this by hundreds of factories along the rivers banks. Municipal sewage constitutes 80% by volume of the total waste dumped into the Ganges, and industries contribute about 15%. Heavy metals, chemicals, solid wastes are in high content in the river water. All this waste-water needs to be treated before dumping it into the river for the sustainable development of our country. So, our project focuses on economical and effective treatment of this polluted water both at the point of generation as well as at the point of entry into the river. Relevance & Motivation - There is an urgent need for controlling and mitigating the water pollution level in the Ganges as 450 million people living in its basin are directly and indirectly dependent upon it. Moreover it supports a widespread aquatic life. Threat of groundwater contamination is also looming even larger than anticipated. An estimated 80% of all health problems and one-third of deaths in India are attributable to water-borne diseases. Even the amount of water in the river is shrinking; in 2004, the Ganges had 20% less water than it did 56 years earlier. To avoid the inevitable, GAP had spent almost Rs.10 billion in a 15 year span, but could not meet its objective. Although this gives us a path to tread upon, we need to build it further. Overall Approach - The polluted water entering the Ganges originates from point and non-point sources. The point sources are large and medium scale plants and the city sewage and the non-point sources consist of small plants and other unaccountable runoffs including some sewage. The point sources can be tapped by the STPs and industry specific ETPs. Most of the bigger plants already have ETPs installed as a result of the GAPs work. The main focus now needs to be on the medium and small scale plants which are large in numbers and spread over a larger area. Building a CETP (Common Effluent Treatment Plant) increases fixed pipeline costs and maintenance costs thereby negating the impact of lower operating costs in a CETP as compared to medium scale ETPs. For very small plants, operating costs are high for small ETPs and most of these industries wont have sufficient land or money to build one. So the idea is to club these small scale plants to a nearby medium or large scale plant, or to make a medium scale independent ETP for a group of small plants. The waste-water can be transported through pipes, trucks or other methods whichever is more feasible for that plant, thereby reducing a large number of the non-point sources. The remaining waste-water would then primarily come from the unaccountable runoffs which is comparably smaller and those caused by poor implementation of the ETPs design, poor regulating mechanism or poor operation. Since the Ganges carries large amounts of water at large flow rates, operating a treatment plant for the whole river will be impractical. The more realistic way to implement cleaning is to identify the large polluting regions (like Kanpur, Kolkata etc.) and prevent waste-water from the whole city from entering the Ganges without treatment so that the waste-water load on the river decreases substantially and more economically. This can be done by the Parallel Line Canal method.

Most plants have a dumping system through which they dispose their waste-water into the Ganges. This waste cannot be collected because of large spread of these exit points. But they mostly end at the river bank. In the parallel line method, a covered waste-water stream is built along the river bank which will have inputs at certain locations in which the waste-water form these sources will get collected. This stream will start from the point of entry of river into that city up to its exit, at which point there will be an ETP which will clean up the waste-water and supply it to nearby farmlands or discharge it into the river. Work Plan

Sewage Treatment (6) (Rajat, Sankalp, Varjeet, Mayank,

Mayank(2), Navdeep)

Paper and Pulp (5)

(Manu, Akshat, Neeraj, Amit, Tushar)

Ganga Clean up

Industrial Waste (14)

Tannery and Rubber (4)

(Deepesh, Manoj, Anuj, Nitish, Agnivesh)

Parallel Line Treatment (7)

(Navneet, Tavneet, Saharsh, Prakhar, Devendra, Mukesh)

Textile (5)
(Akshay, Harshal, Rohan, Dal Chand, Kriteesh)

The work was initiated by dividing it into three major aspects after thorough analysis of the various polluting causes. The work division structure with the number of people assigned has been shown in the flowchart. In the first part (Sewage), STPs are to be designed for the various locations on the basis of the amount of waste, ecological structure and any other specifications relating to the region. In the second part (Industrial waste), three target industries have been identified which are the primary causes of industrial pollution in the river. For these industries, ETPs are to be designed taking into consideration the amount of waste, composition, span of the industrial region and any other regional considerations. Three subgroups have been made for this part, each subgroup dealing with a particular industry. In the parallel line treatment, we are taking Kanpur as a model city for the process. The process, if successful, then can be replicated in other cities. It will require the canal system of 20 km length to be designed so that waste-water can be transported to the treatment plants and the design of a treatment plant which can process a large range of wastes since the wastes will include waste-water from various industries, sewage as well as agricultural wastes among others. This will require processes from the remaining 4 subgroups. So, in each subgroup, a member has been assigned with the task of co-ordinating with this subgroup for the selection of the processes and then finally a treatment plant will be designed by this subgroup. Since the treatment plants design are fairly independent, they can be done concurrently and if any common process is identified, a single design can be done by either of the subgroups depending on the number of processes to be handled by each group.