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The
River Damodar
The river Damodar is polluted with minerals, mine rejects and
toxic effluents. Both its water and its sand are infested by
coal dust and waste from industries that have sprung up in its
basin.
The 563-km-long Damodar originates near Chandwa village in the
Chhotanagpur hills in Bihar's Palamau district. It flows through
one of the richest mineral belts in the world before draining
into the Hooghly, about 50 km south of Calcutta. In the upper
valley area, mining and mine-based industries are the dominant
economic activity, with low agricultural productivity. This,
combined with the heavy mining activity in the area, has made
the valley vulnerable to soil erosion. More than 50 major and
medium industries and over 400 industrial units dot the valley.
Indian industry depends on this region heavily: industry accounts
for 91 per cent of the coal consumed in this country, 60 per
cent coming from the Chhotanagpur belt. The states of Bihar
and West Bengal depend almost entirely on this area for their
power reqirements. How heavily India depends on this region
was evident when Jharkhand agitators had called an economic
blockade of this region in August 1992. In just one week, almost
all industrial activity and rail transport in the country faced
paralysis
Flood control
The average annual rainfall in the Damodar valley is about 1,400
mm. In the monsoon this leads to floods. The Damodar Valley
Corporation (DVC) was set up after the floods of 1943. Flood
control is its primary objective. Now, power generation is the
main objective. There are seven thermal power plants in the
Damodar valley. According to Satyesh Chakraborty, a former professor
at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and an authority
on the Damodar valley, the Centre made money for power generation
more readily available. This has complicated problems as DVC's
power plants consume a lot of river water and dump ash in the
valley.
The mining problem
P Mishra, former chairman of the Bihar State Pollution Control
Board (BSPCB), says that the total suspended solid (TSS) count
at most places along the upper and middle stretches of the river
is 40-50 times higher than the permissible limit.
The Damodar and its tributaries drain almost the entire coal
mining area under the Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL), the Bharat
Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL) and the Eastern Coalfields Ltd (ECL)
— all three subsidiaries of the public sector Coal India
Limited (CIL). The Chhotanagpur region has sustained India's
model of heavy industrialisation over the past 100 years. Coal
extraction began in the 1770s and has continued since. This
is the origin of most of the coal for industries in the country.
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CIL is poised to produce 370 million tonnes of coal by the turn
of the century. Underground mines cannot keep pace with rising
demand. Thus, about 60 per cent of the coal extracted from the
area comes from large, open-cast mines. These mines are serious
sources of land degradation. The disposal of overburden —
rock and soil extracted with the coal — is a big problem
for the coal authorities. Mechanical extraction of coal leads
to the mining of both coal and rock since the machines cannot
distinguish between the two. The rock mined just adds to the
volume of waste generated. The total volume of overburden, which
is about 200 million cubic metres, is likely to be 500 million
cubic metres by the turn of the century.
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Proliferating industries
Coal-based industries of all types have come up in the area
because of locational advantages and the easy availability of
water and power. There are coal washeries, coke-oven plants
and soft-coke batteries. In addition, the landscape is dotted
with various industries varying from steel and cement plants
to fertiliser and explosives plants. None have proper effluent
treatment systems.
Large public sector plants are gradually taking steps to reduce
the tss level and other effluents. Small, private factories
do nothing.
Among the big coal-based industries, 15 washeries account for
the bulk of pollution in terms of tss, oil and grease. The washeries
handle between 3,000 tonnes and 8,000 tonnes of coal per day
and the exact volume of coalfine generated by the washeries
is a secret. However, sources say in certain plants, anything
up to 20 per cent of the coal handled goes out in the form of
slurry, which is deposited outside in ponds. After the slurry
settles in the pond, the sediment — coalfine — rich
in calorific value is collected manually.
The process of recovering coalfine as well as the oil and grease
used in the washeries is variable. Often, the water discharged
into the river from the pond after coalfine is recovered carries
high amounts of fine coal particles and oil. This happens either
because the retrieval methods are inadequate or they are conducted
before all the sediment settles.
The other major coal-based polluters are the coke oven plants
that heat coal to temperatures as high as 1100°c in the
absence of oxygen to prepare it for use in blast furnaces and
foundries. The volatile components in coal are removed, leaving
hot, non-volatile coke in the oven, which is washed with huge
quantities of water and crushed after cooling. However, the
water discharged after the wash contains oil and suspended particles.
Often, the effluents also carry toxic substances such as cyanide.
For instance, BHEL’s pollution control research institute,
which conducted a survey of some of the plants earlier this
year, found cyanide levels in the effluents from the Lodna coke
oven plant at Dhanbad to be as high as 0.54 mg/l, while the
dissolved oxygen was “very low”. Suspended solids,
bod and oil and grease levels were also found to be far in excess
of tolerable limits. The Bararee plant in Dhanbad district was
also found to be discharging effluents into a pond that was
used by the people in the vicinity.
In this case, the TSS, oil and grease levels were above tolerable
limits, but many villagers complained that the pond water often
made them ill.
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Flyash
pollution
The seven thermal power plants in the Damodar valley (three
of which, with a combined installed capacity of about 1,800
mw, belong to the DVC) consume between 3,000 and 8,000 tonnes
of coal a day and as much as 50 per cent of the total solids
generated is in the form of flyash. Yet, there is little effort
to manage the waste. This is obvious from the fact that very
few DVC units, which are better managed than those run by the
state electricity boards, have electrostatic precipitators (ESPS).
Of the six units of the DVC's Chandrapura Thermal Power Plant
in Giridih district, only one has an ESP, while the others make
do with old mechanical dust collectors. As these plants are
located on the banks of the river, the flyash eventually finds
its way into the water.
Disposal of solid waste, or bottom ash, from boilers degrades
the river even more. The bottom ash is supposed to be mixed
with water to form slurry which is then drained into ash ponds.
Most of the ponds are full and in several cases drainage pipes
are choked. The slurry is discharged into the river.
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Affected
population
The people who live in the vicinity of the Damodar are the worst
affected.
The river and its tributaries are the largest sources of drinking
water for the huge population that lives in the valley. On April
2, 1990 about 200,000 litres of furnace oil spilled into the
Damodar river from the Bokaro Steel Plant. The oil travelled
about 150 km downstream to Durgapur and for at least a week
after the incident, the five million people in the area drank
contaminated water. The water from the river that the people
drank was unfit for human consumption, with oil levels 40-80
times higher than the maximum permissible value of 0.03 mg/l.
The urban population of more than 3 million in Bihar and West
Bengal is supplied Damodar water after treatment with lime and
chlorine. The large rural population and urban dwellers outside
the industrial townships are bereft of clean water. In Gomia,
people living just outside the pampered Indian Explosives Limited
(IEL) township depend on water from the Konar, a tributary of
the Damodar. According to a worker of the Asha Seva Kendra,
a missionary hospital on the outskirts of Gomia, even patients
and their attendants often use the river water. Many patients,
mainly TB sufferers, fall ill again.
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Pollution
studies
Scientific agencies and pollution control bodies are not above
suspicion. dvc and cil officials question almost every report
on the state of pollution in the area except the ones they have
commissioned. A well-known scientist involved with pollution
in the Damodar complained scientists and researchers were often
under pressure to alter their findings to give offenders a clean
chit. He alleged that collected samples were fraudulently changed
at times.
The Bihar and West Bengal pollution control boards invite nothing
but ridicule. Says a senior bccl official, "The state pollution
control board officials come for an inspection only when they
need money or a favour. If you make them happy, you can get
a clean chit." Clearly, the two state pollution control
boards have shown little concern for the diseased Damodar. There
is little documentation on the state of the river, even though
the Bihar state pollution control board has no less than 14
monitoring stations. Board officials, including its chairperson
R C Sinha, say "current data is not available and it will
take time to get them". The condition of the West Bengal
board seems to be no better.
To make matters worse, inadequate policy initiatives on the
part of the increasingly militant Jharkhand leadership has made
it easier for lumpen elements in the area to run riot. For a
long time, local thugs ruled the roost, demanding a role in
almost all industrial activity in the area. Most local leaders
want more industries with more jobs and lucrative contracts
for the people.Thus, on the one hand, there are those who genuinely
want to do something to clean the river and, on the other, those
who prefer to collude with the local politicians and thugs and
do nothing about the problem.
Hardly any major industry has come up in the area since the
1970s and the industries and dams once described as the temples
of modern India are sick. The thermal power plants are never
all operational at any given time and the fertiliser factory
at Sindri is often closed. Given their current financial health,
expenditure on pollution control is a low priority.
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Clean-up
plan
The only option seems to be to draw up a master plan for the
whole area and get the industrial units in the area to bear
the costs on the basis of their capacity to pay. The Union government
seems to think the cost of cleaning up the Damodar is worthwhile
and the second phase of the Ganga Action Plan plans to do just
that. Sources in the Ganga Project Directorate in New Delhi
say the state governments have agreed to bear their share of
the cleaning-up expenses, which are expected to total about
Rs 40 crore. But there are doubts about whether the contributions
will actually come in and whether the scheme will have any impact
at all.
The Damodar action plan, an end-of-the-pipe pollution treatment
scheme, seeks to tackle effluents while allowing industry to
continue polluting the region. One viable option could be a
switch to less polluting industries and cleaner technology.
But who is interested in that? Suraj Mandal, Lok Sabha member
and vocal Jharkhand leader, echoes the problem, "The Centre
and the various industrial lobbies are interested only in exploiting
Jharkhand’s resources. Once they have exhausted it, they
will find another area to exploit."
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