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When effluent treatment plants fail

Adam Halliday With environmentalists armed with official data suggesting 21 of the 26 Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETPs) and Final Effluent Treatment Plants (FETPs) in Gujarat are consistently unable to meet standards, interviews with academics and officials reveal the technical and organisational difficulties that are inherent in running these plants. Last week, environmentalists led by Vadodara-based Rohit Prajapati under the banner Parvyavaran Suraksha Samiti had released Right to Information (RTI) replies that showed these "treated effluents" were not meeting norms set by the government. They had specifically criticised the treatment plants at Ankleshwar and Vapi as the clusters had earlier been tagged "critically polluted" by the Union Environment Ministry, and a moratorium on expansions imposed. While Vapi's moratorium was lifted in February this year following promises by industries to clean up their act Ankleshwar's remains. Last year, A K A Rathi, a CEPT University professor and former Chief Technical Adviser and Director (Environment) to the Gujarat Government, wrote a paper titled "Common Environmental Infrastructure: Case Study on the Treatment of Common Effluent Treatment Plants" and analysed eight such treatment plants along the chemical belt, including the ones at Vapi and Ankleshwar. Prof Rathi, who was at the time a government nominee in the boards of the companies running these plants, says Rs 96.6 crore were spent to set up these eight plants, which includes Rs 26.3 crore given by the government. In the clusters where these plants are located, wastewater from member industries were taken to the plants either through pipelines or dedicated tankers. After treatment, the effluents were released into the sea, or into creeks or rivers nearby. According to the data contained in the RTI replies the environmentalists shared with the media, the member industries fed these treatment plants with what seemed to be untreated effluents or effluents that were not treated properly, possibly leading to the inefficiencies, something Prof Rathi also took note of. But the senior academic went a step further and said that, in the first place, there had been something wrong with the way some of these plants were designed; "there was lack of expertise" and "proper facilities for carrying out treatability studies", "only few parameters... were considered", "microbiologists were not involved" and there was a "dearth of experienced operating personnel". Senior Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the industrial research environment is partly to blame: "While there is plenty of research on chemicals, there is way too little research on how these chemicals can be treated," said one official. Another official pointed out that industry associations often do not enforce upon members that the waste they feed the plants are to be segregated according to the norms, and that the board is also stretched in getting its inspectors to individually inspect each and every one of the thousands of industries. "When effluents are not segregated properly and fed into these plants, it becomes a problem. We haul up industries that do not comply, but it becomes difficult because manpower is limited also," the official said. At a managerial level, Prof Rathi said the membership of the Board that manages the plants needs to be changed: "There is an obvious conflict of interest when the board is made up of the industry associations' office-bearers. Representatives of member industries who are not office-bearers must be on the board, and day-to-day functioning should be left to a professional manager. I have suggested this to the government since long ago," he said. A top GPCB official, however, said that in the plant at Vapi, a professional CEO has been appointed and the board has been taken over by the government. "We believe this has sent a signal to all others that you will be shaken up if you don't perform," the official said. While the environmentalists demanded that the expansion of Gujarat's chemical industries be stopped because polluted and toxic chemicals continue to be released, both Prof Rathi and GPCB officials said this is not an option. Rathi argues that treatment plants can be improved and have "proved to be beneficial for the industries, especially for SMEs as well as for the environment". Officials, on the other hand, said shutting down the chemical sector would, in effect, close down a vast portion of the economy, refuting the environmentalists' charge that "safety is sacrificed for the sake of GDP". (Source: Indian Express, 11th May 2011)