SATARA/SANGLI: Like the Ganga, the Krishna is believed to be a cleanser of sins, and therefore receives a fair share of the remains of human lives. Not entire dead bodies, as in the Ganga, but quite a load of ashes and bones.
A study conducted in 2013 by Dr B N Gophane, a visiting faculty at Shivaji University in Karad, Maharashtra, revealed that nearly three to five tonnes of human ash and bones are dumped in the river at Satara, Sangli and Karad every year.
Krishna’s tributaries Venna, Panchganga, Warna or Koyna are all considered holy, and where they merge with the Krishna, they contribute their own load of pollutants. “Brick factories, sand mining, fertiliser and pesticide-laden runoff from agricultural lands, human waste from dozens of towns all contribute to the degradation of the river,” Gophane says.
Nowhere is this degradation more evident than in dreary Sangli, a town that has never seen better days despite producing several political heavyweights. The Mai ghat watches over a tide of untreated dirt, brought in by two streams. One is a stream carrying the city’s sewage and other the infamous Sheri Nala.
Talk to any environmentalist in Maharashtra about Sangli and the name of Sheri Nala pops up immediately. What these two streams contain are industrial and human refuse, let into the river without any treatment.
There is one filtration plant on the outskirts, but the waste from the town’s industrial belts—Miraj, Kupwad, Madhavnagar—and its sugarcane factories flows untreated into the Krishna.
Mohan Chormule has been living in Sangli for 30 years and is a bitter man. A driver in the milk cooperative unit located right next to Sheri Nala, he has organised awareness campaigns and lobbied every official and elected rep to clean up the Krishna, but nothing has changed. “A lot of political bigwigs have visited this place and promised to take care of it and nothing has happened. There are so many powerful ministers from this area and not one is interested in developing their own town,” he says.
When concerns arose about the pollution, the town administration laid down a pipeline to pump out the sewage. An administration worker M G Sanadi shows us around. So where is the sewage pumped out to? Downstream, of course! What’s the point? Sanadi just smiles and says, “But that’s how it is been done for the past 40 years.” The collector of Sangli, Shekar Gaikwad, agrees that this is a problem. No town on this stretch of the Krishna has anything like a sewage treatment plant. “One treatment plant is being constructed, but it requires another `50-60 crore to complete. The local administration just doesn’t have that kind of money,” he says.
Little steps, however, are being taken to stop the defilement of the Krishna. In Islampur nearby, a gas-based crematorium was constructed but it had no takers initially. People were loathe to giving up the traditional ways of cremating bodies. But in the end financial prudence won. “We did not have any takers in the first month and then they began to trickle in. The wood for traditional cremation costs `4,000 whereas the gas-based crematorium costs only Rs 450. It made economic sense. But then people need the ash to immerse in the river. So we modified the design,” Gaikwad says.