NEW DELHI: For the Union Government cleaning the dying Yamuna will not be an easy task, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent direction to accomplish the task through an action plan drawn up on the lines of the British Government's success in cleaning up the river Thames in London.

While it took the British Government almost two decades to clean up and revive the once "biologically dead" Thames, the Indian Government's has presented to the Apex Court just a four-year project to clean up the Yamuna. The Centre's plan is to set up sewage treatment plants (STPs) at points where all major drains meet the river Yamuna to ensure that no untreated sewage or industrial effluent get discharged into the river.

Interestingly, the condition of the Yamuna today is almost the same as that of the Thames in 1950's, and in 1957, London's Natural History Museum declared the Thames "biologically dead". It was after this that the cleaning and rehabilitation work in the river commenced with the British Government improving sewage waste treatment and banning industry from discharging pollutants into the river.

According to the National Geographic news.com, now the river that flows through the heart of Europe's largest city is awash with life. "More than 130 seals have been spotted in the Thames since last August, according to the Zoological Society of London. Bottlenose dolphins have been seen upstream of London Bridge. With 120 fish species, hundreds of thousands of birds, and a thriving fishing industry, the river now ranks among the cleanest metropolitan tideways in the world."

Quoting Martin Attrill, a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth, England, the website states that the condition of the Thames was very different 150 years ago. 1858 saw the "Great Stink" when the stench of raw sewage got so bad that Parliament, which meets in a riverside building, had to be dissolved.

"In 1878, the pleasure steamship Princess Alice sunk in a river collision. Most of the 600 or so passengers who died did so because they were overpowered by a noxious cocktail of human and industrial filth before they could reach safety. By the 1950s the Thames was in an even worse state. A 20-km stretch of river was completely devoid of oxygen."

The website further adds that today more than half of London's sewage sludge is sold in pellet form as fertilizer for agricultural use. Mr. Attrill says water quality has continued to improve since the 1970s. There's been a clear and very dramatic decrease in levels of heavy metals and pesticides.

However, the story of the Yamuna has been grim as the Comptroller and Auditor General's latest report states that the Delhi Government's plan for controlling water pollution in the river has been termed as a "big flop" as the Rs. 872 crores spent on this project has gone down the drain. "At the point of its exit from Delhi at Okhla, the water quality is unfit for sustaining aquatic life and does not conform to water quality of bathing standards," the report said.

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