Shamya Dasgupta | November, 2002

The growing importance of river bio-monitoring is emphasised by Dr. R.C. Trivedi at the Central Pollution Control Board in an interview with www.cleanganga.com

	A large number of chemicals flow into the Yamuna everyday

Over the past decade bio-monitoring studies of environmental components have become an important prerequisite in evaluating the extent of pollution control in a cost-effective way.

Ever since the Ganga Action Plan was initiated in the mid-80s, this methodology has found a lot of takers. The Central Pollution Control Board has taken a particular lead that takes into account various factors, while omitting others. This method is said to provide as precise a picture as possible of the state of India's water bodies.

The head of the programme is Dr. R.C. Trivedi at the Board, who says that in moving toward pollution control, an important exercise is to monitor the characteristics of the water body in question. "And for that, the most important aspect is the physico-chemical characteristics of the rivers. That, to our mind, is adequate to give an idea of the levels of pollution in a particular water body."

Here today, gone tomorrow
This, of course, leaves out a number of factors, such as the chemical content in water. This increases with each passing day because of the increasing amount of agricultural and industrial wastes flowing into rivers.

But Trivedi says, "there is a large amount of chemicals that flow into the rivers by virtue of the industries and agricultural fields that use pesticides. But it is impossible to detect and monitor them, primarily because the amount of each chemical is too little."

"Also, common sense will tell you that these chemicals are not constant in the water. On one particular day, the content may be very high. But by the time the study finishes and the report is prepared, the water might bear no trace of the same chemical. In the Yamuna River, alone, there will probably be thousands of different chemicals in such small amounts. So firstly it is too costly a process and secondly it doesn't help in the precision of the findings."

The programme was set in motion only about five years ago, though the plans were finalised as early as in 1988. Between 1988 and 1991, the Yamuna River was "test-tested" as the result of Indo-Dutch collaboration and the results were heartening enough for the government to give it the go-ahead. But then the government procrastinated. So it took Trivedi and his team a couple of years to get the ball rolling.

According to Trivedi, the first step was to define the approach to be taken toward problem areas. Quoting from CPCB's Bio-monitoring of Water Bodies, Trivedi says: "24 problem areas have been identified in the country in collaboration with the concerned State Pollution Control Boards and committees. The pollution control measures had been initiated at these areas through time-bound action plans to mitigate environmental problems and ensure improvement in environmental quality." Essentially, the ecological sustainability of recipient fresh water resources found in some of these areas are constantly threatened in spite of various preventive policies. Therefore, programmes like river bio-monitoring become all the more relevant.

Selected parameters
Trivedi talks us through the basic importance and scope of the programme: "To start with, like I said before, we are not going for every available parameter that is available. We target only a few parameters and this sort of an approach is called approaching summary parameters. What we get as a result is a summary situation. A situation that reflects the overall quality of the water body in question and reflects the quality of life in the water. You can say that we are only trying to know the effect of the situation and not trying to go too deep into the causes."

The objectives of biological water quality assessment are:

• Assessment of physico - chemical and biological water quality of surface water bodies in problem areas.
  
  
• Assessment of the improvement in water quality over the years as a result of actions taken for pollution control in problem areas.
  
  
• Bio-monitoring of water bodies associated with problem areas and assessment of water quality through Primary Water Quality Criteria (PWQC) and Biological Water Quality Criteria (BWQC) in terms of designated best-use.
  
  

Trivedi says that during the development and validation of bio-monitoring methodology phase, they established the fact that among all the biological components of the aquatic ecosystem, benthic macro-invertebrates are the most suitable for evaluation of water quality. Most of these, particularly aquatic insect larvae, share their biological life in fresh water, while their adults move far away in search of suitable fresh water environment for reproduction and establishing biological communities.

Diversity score
The Trivedi team adopted two methodologies: Sequential comparison for diversity score and the Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP) for the saprobic score. The combination of the range of saprobic score with the diversity score indicates the ecological health and environmental conditions of the water body.

His program has not been clear sailing. After a bit of probing, Trivedi admitted that government policies in some regards have resulted with most of the state-run units functioning less smoothly than was originally planned. He says, "manpower really is the biggest problem. The other problem is in operating the technology that is necessary to achieve the desired results. The problem with the state-run units is that they have fallen short so far in achieving the precision that is required."

Some 14 states, with over 50 stations on 12-15 rivers and a number of others on lakes and reservoirs are currently participating in the programme. CPCB regularly prepares the data in accordance with submissions from the state units. But in spite of CPCB having the rights to issue directions and recommendations to the state units, they seem to have taken it a bit too casually thus far. Admittedly, the CPCB officials, Trivedi included, cannot be held responsible for this, as the onus rests solely on the government - the Ministry of Environment and Forests. And the ministry is not making the necessary moves to get this pollution monitoring system in motion, which just may be the way forward.

Shamya Dasgupta is a Delhi-based freelance journalist