Kerala - Kochi   

Search on for River Keeper of the Periyar

KOCHI: A search is now on for a suitable candidate, willing to be the River Keeper of the Periyar. A government agency or a committed NGO will be ideal. Unfortunately, no one wants to continue the pioneering work started by Greenpeace, the global environmental NGO. This, despite the fact that the highly contaminated Periyar, the longest river in Kerala, is gasping for life.

V.J. Jose was appointed the River Keeper by Greenpeace in 2002 to monitor the water quality of the Periyar and keep tabs on the health of the ailing river. Mr. Jose assumed charge after Greenpeace got involved in the campaign against dumping of chemical effluents in the Periyar by factories in the Eloor-Edayar region.

Greenpeace had planned to hand over the mantle to the local community after a year. “We are ready to train people, supply water test kits and provide other backup services. We need to hand the responsibility to the community here and continue our mission in other parts of India. The Periyar community should keep the institution going and make it more relevant,” Mr. Jose says.

He is the second person in the world to hold the title of river keeper (the first was for New York’s Hudson River). Initially, armed with a test kit and a night-vision camera, Mr. Jose used to patrol the river frequently and collect water samples twice a week from four select spots. He was trained at the People’s Science Institute, Dehradun, in water quality monitoring.

His tests found that the iron content in the Periyar was 10 times more than the permissible limit, chloride 20 times higher and phosphate and nitrates much above normal. Water hardness and temperature are high and transparency, low. “However, the biggest threat to human health is the extremely high content of faecal coli in the Periyar,” he told The Hindu. He pointed out that 62 illegal underwater outlets dumped harmful effluents from factories.

In his view, water quality should be monitored twice a day and the newspapers should carry ‘Periyar water quality reports’ daily, a la temperature reports, so that people will be aware of the quality of their drinking water. Moreover, the government should take the reports seriously, he said, adding that authorities, including the Pollution Control Board, had ignored his reports.

Mr. Jose feels that in view of the role of rivers in Kerala and the shrinking drinking water resources in the State, each of the 44 rivers should have river keepers. The river keeper should ideally be an institution backed by the local community. The keeper should be empowered to monitor the entire stretch of the river and to check all harmful activities such a dumping of garbage, encroachments on the river and sand-mining.

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