Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath advocated practising phytoremediation to tackle river pollution. The chief minister, who visited Gorakhpur on Friday, was impressed by the results of phytoremediation in reducing pollution levels in Rapti river.
The Uttar Pradesh chief minister said that the municipal authorities had initially planned to install a sewage treatment plant which would have cost Rs 110 crore. Besides it, the plant would also have incurred expenses for electricity and maintenance. Instead, phytoremediation had made cleaning the river possible in just Rs 70 lakh. “This is a sustainable model”, he said.
Phytoremediation is the use of plants to remove pollutants from the environment. It is environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and offers the possibility of harvesting plants for the extraction of absorbed contaminants such as metals, which cannot be easily biodegraded for recycling.
The chief minister said that before 2017, the municipal authority had been fined multiple times by the National Green Tribunal for pollution of the river.
However, even as late as 2023, the NGT had determined that the state government was liable for the discharge of 55 MLD (mega litres per day) sewage into rivers at Gorakhpur. It had also said that there had been a failure to process solid waste and 3.8 lakh metric tonnes of it was being disposed off in the river at two sites. For these offences, the NGT had determined a compensation of Rs 120 crore.
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Yogi Adityanath highlighted the effectiveness of phytoremediation in reducing the BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) level of the Rapti from 350 to 15-18. Earlier, the high levels of BOD in the Rapti made it unfit even for irrigation. The CM suggested that phytoremediation be adopted for all drains so that when they fell into rivers, they would not pollute them.
He also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the ‘Namami Gange’ and the ‘Har Ghar Jal’ programme, which he said had made clean water a priority and also revived the cultural significance of rivers.
