Southern States - Kerala-Thiruvananthapuram   

Funds crunch hits sewage plant project

By G. Mahadevan

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM Nov. 25. Even as efforts to set up a sewage treatment plant at the city's sewage farm has faltered due to lack of funding, concerns have been raised afresh on the continuing environmental and health hazards posed by the decades-old sewage farm.

Though the Water Resources Minister, T. M. Jacob, had recently announced that the Government was taking steps to set up a treatment plant at the sewage farm, officials of the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) contacted by The Hindu were not so sanguine about the possibility of finding adequate funds for the project.

According to the sources in the KWA, the city urgently needs a sewage treatment plant with a capacity of at least 40 million litres a day (mld). At current costs, such a plant would cost anywhere between Rs. 30 to Rs. 40 crores, sources said.

It is pointed out that the main reason why lending agencies have shied away from funding the plant-project was because sewerage services do not generate any income for the KWA. "No agency will fund an operation which we are running on a loss. The fact is, if the KWA was converted into a company, it would have to shut down its sewerage operations just to stay afloat," explained a KWA engineer.

The KWA has proposed to the government that the latter implement a "drainage cess," fixed at a fraction of the drinking water charges incurred by a household. This, the KWA pointed out to the Government, would generate much needed income for the sewerage division of the Authority.

This would also lend respectability to this division in the eyes of lending agencies who may then be more inclined to fund a multi-crore project such as the setting up of a treatment plant at the Sewage Farm. The Government should, however, act fast, sources point out.

The 102-acre Sewage Farm was set up on the banks of the Parvathy Puthanar more than five decades ago, to produce fodder using raw sewage as a natural fertilizer. Untreated sewage reaches the farm via pipelines from the Kuriathi sewage pumping station. This is stored in a tank and then diluted using water from tube wells in the farm.

The resulting combination is then made to flow throughout the farm via a system of pipelines laid beneath the soil. The solid waste is trapped by the soil while the excess water is drained off into a catchment canal, which empties into the Parvathy Puthanar.

Sources in the KWA say the Farm was performing well within its capacity till about two decades ago. In recent years, however, the population explosion in the city and the consequent quantum jump in the amount of sewage reaching the Farm has overloaded it many times over.

An Environmental Assessment study conducted by the Kerala Urban Development Project during the early 1990s, found that the sewage sludge inside the farm contained high amounts of organic carbon— around 1.59 to 2.64 per cent. The Ph values were low and the soluble salt content of the sludge was very high.

The sludge was found to contain concentrations of metals such as iron, manganese, zinc and copper. The presence of these metals in the sludge, in spite of their scarce availability in the incoming effluent indicated the accumulation of these metals as sediment in the soil.

The study also returned very high readings for the Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) and the Dissolved Oxygen (DO) factors in the water in the Puthanar, indicating that the Farm was adding to the already heavy pollution in the canal. The higher the BOD, the higher will be the functioning of the aerobic bacteria which will use up the dissolved oxygen in the water and release carbon dioxide, ammonia and sulphur compounds.

The KUDP study also revealed the presence of ammonia, nitrogenous and phenolic compounds in wells around the Farm. This, say, sources, is because the sand in the Farm area is very porous and causing dissemination of pollutants into the ground water table in the locality. The situation, since 1995, could only have worsened, sources argue.

It is pointed out that unless the Government takes steps to make the sewerage division financially viable, the city will continue to suffer the fallouts of a super-polluted sewage farm.

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