The Damodar is dying

“Even at Rajrappa, Bihar, we saw the river waterdirty and turgid. Ten years ago, the river flowed clean at those upper reaches,” rues Dr Sarajit Datta, DVC’s director, Research, who visited the same region, about 50 km from Hazaribagh, last week. “All along the coal mining area you can see the overburden dumps from the opencast mines right on the riverbank. Comes a strong wind and half the dump is in the river,” he says.

Planners of the Damodar Valley Corporation had certainly not foreseen this. The Damodar had always been known as the “river of sorrow” to the people who lived along its banks. With every monsoon, it leaves a trail of death and destruction. In fact, the idea of taming the deadly river came in the wake of the 1943 floods which had ravaged the valley.

Today, as the DVC celebrates its 50th year this month and takes pride in its record in flood control and power generation, there are voices expressing concern over the river’s future. But 50 years ago there was only optimism. While tabling the DVC Bill in the Constituent Assembly in1948, N.V. Gadgil had anticipated the “multiplier effects” it will have in its 24,235 sq km command area in engednering socio-economic development.

Those were heady days for the just-independent country that looked forward to a new, industrialised era. The DVC, the first multipurpose project modelled on USA’s Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering effort. Nehru called it a “mighty experiment” and its dams and power stations “temples of modern India”.

There was no room for today’s environmental concerns in that euphoria. The original Rs 55-crore project envisaged eight dams with a total storage capacity of 1.85 million cubic metre of water, one 200 MW hydroelectric power plant, one 150 MW thermal power station, a network of canals to provide perennial irrigation to a total area of 7,60,000 acres and a power transmission grid initially of 241.4 km of 132 kv lines with five grid substations.

In the first phase of the project, however, four dams at Maithon and Panchet in West Bengal and atKonar and Tilaiya in Bihar and a barrage at Durgapur were constructed with a total flood reserve capacity of 1,295 million cubic metres. DVC officials say the dams have helped prevent 12 major floods since they came up.

According to deputy chief engineer K.K. Chakravarty, the floods in the lower reaches of the river, affecting the Hooghly and Howrah districts of West Bengal, occur because the Lower Damodar Drainage Scheme, initially part of the DVC project, was never implemented by the West Bengal government. What’s more, human settlements have increasingly encroached on the river’s drainage channel. Four more dams planned in the second phase at Balpahari, Aiyar, Bokaro and Bermo, all in Bihar were never taken up and now look unlikely ever to come up.

The DVC’s thermal power stations at Bokaro, Chandrapura, Durgapur and Mejia together now have a total capacity of 2,325 MW, three hydel power stations 144 MW and one gas turbine station of 82.5 MW. Its 2,495 km network of canals is capable of irrigating3.64 lakh ha of farmland.

One success story has been its soil conservation efforts in the upper reaches and the 8,400 check dams which were built to control the flow of silt. In fact, DVC officials proudly claim that the soil conservation measures have improved the life expectancy of the dams at Tilaiya, Konar and Maithon by 41 per cent and that of the Panchet dam by 164 per cent. It’s also true that because of the minor irrigation irrigation facilities, the traditional red, stony soil of the Dhanbad-Hazaribagh region has now been transformed into a veritable green belt, yielding several crops a year.But it’s certainly not a story of unadulterated success. The biggest problem, as DVC officials themselves admit, is that very little has been done to save the life of the river.

In 1983, the Central Pollution Control Board launched `Operation Damodar’ which identified 42 industries, almost equally divided between Bihar’s Bokaro-Dhanbad and West Bengal’s Durgapur-Asansol industrial regions, which dischargedwaste water into the river. In 1990, the Union environment ministry initiated a dialogue with Bihar and West Bengal on the Damodar Action Plan on the lines of the Ganga Action Plan. But an ugly debate on who should be on the board stymied the initiative. Then one heard of the 1994 environmental survey commissioned by the same ministry and executed by the Central Mining Research Institute, Dhanbad.

The problem seems to lie in the unregulated burgeoning of industrial units along the river banks since the 1983 study. Coal washeries alone now number about 50 and they are among the worst offenders. During the dry season, much of the river becomes a drain for carrying industrial effluents. All these poisons are murdering the Damodar. While there is an ever increasing demand of its water from industrial and domestic users, there is less and less water. What’s worse, even the available water is becoming increasingly unusable. The “invisible returns”of the DVC that Gadgil talked about is certainly quite visibletoday. But, unfortunately, what is even more visible today is the environmental catastrophe it has perpetrated. There is no doubt about it, the Damodar is dying.

Warning: poisonous substances

Some experts believe that the Damodar receives more pollutants than the Ganga. According to a 1990 estimate, the Damodar received 41077.7 million litres of industrial affluents per day, as against 430 mld that the Ganga received from the industries on its banks.

These are the offenders: n Coalfields North and South Karanpura, East and West Bokaro and the Jharia coalfields. Untreated water from underground and opencast mines, overburden dumps due to stripping of opencast mines and coal dust from the coal handling plants merge into the river water

Besides this, there are 37 majormineral-based industries which, together with the coal mines, came up after clearing some 80,000 ha of forest land (recently however, the DVC has been able to create green belts in many parts of the project area).

The river water is arguably the worst affected in the lower valley below the Durgapur barrage, where the entire affluxion from the Durgapur industrial complex flows into the river. It is all the more alarming, experts say, since this polluted water is used for the irrigation of crops.

The project planners had hoped that the major units on the river bank would do their bit for the environmental management of the area. But the giant PSUs that dot the area have let the river down.