How Safe Is Your Drinking Water in India? Be Aware of These!

Water and Air are the two primary necessities naturally available to ensure life to sustain on earth. These two natural resources are also provided with certain levels of natural automatic processes to keep them safe for all living beings on earth, including humans.

But human population growth coupled with ever expanding human activities can cause these abundant natural resources to become polluted. Pollution of air and water can cause problems to human health. Thus air and water pollution has become an important issue for all nations of the world to give much attention. Environmental protection laws have become an important aspect of modern society.

India too has been giving much attention to environmental protection. It has also enacted several environmental protection laws and constituted several authorities to safeguard its air, water and land resources from becoming unsustainable on account of various hazards, including pollution.

View of a Poorly Maintained 

Drinking Water Pumping Station in India

In India, there is  the Central Pollution Control Board at the national level and the various state pollution control boards. Environmental statutes have become so stringent in the recent years that it is not so easy for any infrastructure or industrial project to take shape without going through many so called environmental protection related statutory hurdles. The hindrances have also created allegations of corruption ruling the roost with the Indian environmental regulations, rather than them honestly implemented under a balanced system of sustainable development, for the benefit of the people at large. 

In India there also exist independent environmental activist groups and non governmental agencies who also play an important role in deciding the environmental policies of the government. The Center for Science and Environment (CSE) is one such agency. But many such activist groups and organizations become too idealistic to be practical or balanced in their outlooks and approaches. Vested interests also might cause them to work out of focus occasionally. Using environmental issues as a guise for political gains is also not uncommon.

A Poorly Maintained Indian Drinking Water Treatment Plant

For example, there have been hues and cries in India against some companies using ground water as their resource for making and marketing aerated soft drinks. The agitation in Kerala spearheaded against the Coca-Cola company's Plachimada bottling plant in Palghat is a typical case of this kind.

Problems created by pollution is also a big opportunity for big economic activities, human creativity, business and big employment generation. Unfortunately, the Indian authorities and the Indian political leaders and the common people are blissfully unaware of this and seem to ignore the potentials of using this to a win-win situation for all.

For example let me take the example of drinking water supply in India. Water supply and sanitation are the fundamental  factors that govern the progress of any society. The fundamental job of any municipality or any city corporation is to ensure the supply of safe drinking water to the house holds, take care of the waste water and to address the issue of solid wastes. In olden days, Public Health Engineering was one of the most important departments entrusted with these tasks. Unfortunately, India has blissfully ignored this over the years!

Even well educated people in India are now blissfully unaware about the methods adopted by their municipalities and city corporations in managing these activities. Their elected representatives are also any better in possessing this awareness. With the advancement of human activities, the water supply and sanitation processes and its management have become more complex, calling for a higher degree of expertise and competency. Unfortunately, this aspect has been consistently getting neglected in India for the past couple of decades.

A well maintained Indian WTP Just After Commissioning

When industrial establishments, cities, towns and homes do not have proper waste disposal systems, the waste waters discharged into the ground and to the drainage systems (as available - artificial or natural) would deplete the nature's ability to revert it back to the original quality. When the waste water or sewage load is more than the natural capacity of restoration, the natural water bodies such as ground water, streams, rivers, ponds and lakes begin to become polluted. In such a scenario our natural sources for fresh water become perennially polluted. Our old and conventional methods of making safe drinking water may not yield safe drinking water any more, unless we invest more to modify our water treatment plants and facilities. In many instances, even costly water treatment facilities fail to yield good drinking water. Besides, the waste water from the water treatment plants also would become more difficult to manage. It soon develops as a technological vicious circle with no practical solutions!

In the United States of America, they have the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) empowered by various federal statutes including the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The website of EPA provide the much needed information for the guidance of their citizens.

View of A Well Maintained 

Drinking Water Pumping Station in the USA

As against this, it would be interesting to note the various guidelines, laws, regulations and protocols that are said to be applicable in India with regard to water supply and sanitation. There are several of them and one can see them at a glance as compiled and provided in the website of the International Environmental Law Research Centre (IELRC).

The difference between what exists in the US and what exists in India is glaringly visible when you do an honest comparison. In India, there is no law that makes it mandatory for any one to ensure safe drinking water to the citizens. What exist are a set of half-cooked or impractical guidelines apparently worked out by several agencies without due understanding of the technical or practical issues involved!

Thus even the best water treatment plants in India that existed a couple of decades ago with reasonably good operation and maintenance practices are increasingly getting neglected over the years. There is a drastic reduction in the technical competence of the people who manage the existing water or waste water treatment facilities. Most water and waste water treatment facilities do not have any competent water analysts or the necessary water quality testing laboratories. What existed as some best facilities some decades ago have mostly become dilapidated or practically non-functional. The contradictory or vague or impractical guidelines and protocols have made the situation to slip from bad to the worst. Lack of awareness in the public coupled with administrative apathy has caused further damage.

One of the noteworthy examples of technical incompetence and managerial apathy in the area of waste water management resulting in a big failure was  the much fan-fared Ganga Action Plan of the government of India some years ago. Money in billions got spent without achieving the desired results and the River Ganges still remains as one of the worst polluted fresh water source for millions of people of India even now.

There is no difference in the technology or engineering of water treatment and management anywhere in the world. There is also no difference in the water testing or interpretation techniques. Water and waste water treatment technologies are also not such technologies where you need space or rocket scientists and engineers. But at the same time they also technical issues where technical expertise and experience matter a lot. In other words, any tom-dick-and-harry cannot be entrusted with the task of managing the water and waste water treatment systems. The technology and engineering involve much multi-disciplinary skills which need to be understood and addressed with due care by the authorities!

Modern water and waste water treatment requires knowledge in chemistry, hydraulics, civil engineering, chemical engineering, instrumentation and automation, toxicology, bio-chemistry, environmental laws, etc. It provides ample scope for engineers from all these fields to gain much practical experience and expertise. It also provides opportunities for employment generation and development of business.

Regrettably, India lacks the much needed technical expertise in this field in its top echelons of administrative hierarchy which is essential for formulating proper policies by the government. The mistakes of the past get repeated when attempts are repeated in the same manner as what had been done earlier! If Ganga Action Plan failed earlier, it could fail again if the authorities do not learn from the mistakes of the past. It is essential that conventional administrative procedures and systems need to be reworked with intelligent inputs from people having the necessary multidisciplinary expertise and innovative ideas in this field.

The most important aspect of making safe drinking water is to have more and more fresh raw water sources with minimal contamination as the input to the drinking water plants. Conventionally, drinking water treatment involves raw water lifting, screening, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection, storage and distribution. When the raw water becomes polluted to some degree, the conventional treatment plants no more produce safe drinking water. For example, raw water contaminated with sewage containing soaps and detergents will not fully get rid of these contaminants when treated in the conventional treatment plant. The conventional chlorination treatment might even generate carcinogens in the drinking water that is produced from such raw waters contaminated by such organic chemicals.

Unlike in the past, most water treatment facilities in India are now operated and managed by people with relatively low skills and expertise. In many places, the concerned top authorities take the installation, operation and maintenance of water treatment facilities for granted. Many plants do not have the required level of competent manpower. A good majority of them have no facilities for water quality monitoring! Plants which are erected and commissioned with full facilities get degraded and dilapidated in a few years time due to the low priorities given by the authorities.

Water treatment facilities in India used to be considered as prime installations of national importance during the initial few decades after India's independence from the British rule. The British legacy was to consider these facilities with due diligence. Even in the 1980 when I joined my professional career, water treatment and public health engineering used to be an area of prime importance to the top managements of not only the municipalities but also of the large scale industries.

But things deteriorated in later years. I do not say that this situation is worrisome everywhere in India. But, in general things have deteriorated much. Water and waste water management technologies have advanced much in the recent years in many countries. Though some progressive private sector companies in India are making advantage of such technologies to a greater extent, this is not so in the case of the government departments and public sector industries due to either lack of awareness or on account of competency vacuums that has developed in recent years.

The general deterioration of piped drinking water supply quality has caused the proliferation of bottled mineral water companies. Packed mineral water in plastic bottles and pouches are now causing serious land pollution problems due to the empty bottles and pouches. 

Health conscious and well-to-do city dwellers no more consider their piped water supply as safe. Domestic water purifiers are doing roaring business now! How safely these provide good quality water can only be guessed as there is no facility available to the users to check the quality of water!

In my opinion consumers of water need to enhance their general awareness in these areas. In the present times, even the sick people no more take their medical doctors for granted. Therefore it is a good idea to gain some knowledge about the manner in which the drinking water comes to you and also the manner in which it is finally disposed.

Those interested to get some basic ideas about water, the US-EPA site is a good educator. 

As far as India is concerned, I earnestly hope that our new government would initiate some better systems to address the various issues involved with drinking water treatment, distribution, sanitation, waste water treatment, disposal and re-use, in the days to come.

Let us hope that our democratic local governments and other such authorities responsible for providing safe drinking water to the people, take these things seriously and initiate actions for Swacch Pani (clean, safe water) in order to make the recently started Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign) a remarkable and sustainable success!

Let us also hope that our environmental authorities of the central and state levels too wake up to learn some lessons from the developed nations!

What Are the Problems Preventing Educated Indians To Cast Their Votes?

If They Can Vote, Why Can't You? 
(जब ये तैयार हैं तो आप क्यों नहीं?)  

An Election Commission of India News Paper Advertisement!

Did you notice this advertisement of the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the newspapers recently? (See the scan above) It has the picture of a person in wheel chair and it poses a question in Hindi which translates as ' If they can vote, why can't you?'  

Obviously, the advertisement is aimed to instigate the educated people of India who are eligible to exercise their franchise to vote! Such an advertisement indirectly means that many people are not voting in India. The ECI must have thought to do something about it to improve the situation!

The state where I currently live would go for general elections 2014 shortly. It is scheduled to be held in 5 phases by the Election Commission during Nov-Dec 2014.

The election commission of India has made elaborate plans for this election management which they call it as the 'systematic voters' education and electoral participation' or 'sveep' by which Jharkhand is planned to be swept thoroughly as far as the coverage is concerned. The poll authority is planning to have the voting percentage enhanced this time from the poor shows of the past.

The newspaper advertisement above is part of the plan. Through the advertisement, the poll authority is challenging all the eligible able-bodied voters of the state who apparently shy away from exercising their franchises. 

I had written some aspects of this in the light of the recent initiatives by the election commission of India in one of my earlier blogs. I had written about the ECI's initiative to get voters registered online to get them enrolled in the voters' list. I had written about my personal experience (of failure!) by trying out that method!

Why do we have a very low voter turnout in India?

The first and foremost thing in my opinion lies with the methodology adopted by the Election Commission to create and update what is called the voters' list and the voter identity card.

Election commission of India makes no differentiation to the citizens with regard to their financial or social standing. The ECI treats all citizens equally. A vote exercised by the richest man and the poorest man has the same value! It is indeed a very good thing. There is no partiality at least in this matter in India!

But the political leaders and the ECI also do not want any aliens to vote and destabilize the country. So, in the recent years, they have introduced the concept of the photo identity card. Coupled with it is the voter list as prepared by the ECI which keeps updated every now and then by a process adopted by them.

The voter identity card concept is good. But it is some thing which is practically impossible for a country like India to implement. The voter ID card is conceived to have a photo of the voter together with his or her age and the address recorded on it as applicable at the time creating the card. There are three variables in this card which could change with time. They are the facial features, the age and the address of residence.

Thus a voter ID card which is suitable for one election may not be suitable for the next election which comes after a couple of years later.

The ECI does not have any localized offices or agencies which are easily approachable by the public where one can file an application for making changes in the voter ID card and get an updated card. They also do not have any permanent staff for doing this work.

Same is the case with the making of the voters list. Now, the voters having the ID card and also who are in the voters' list can only cast their votes in what is called a polling booth which is a improvised set up set up for the day of voting in some available building, usually in some dilapidated local government school or some thing of that sort. 

For the rural folks, who are permanently staying in the villages for quite some years, the voters' list and the polling booths are well known and well identified without much difficulty.

But that is not the case with those in the cities. The polling booths and the voters' list in the cities are mutually invisible for all practical purposes.

The Election commission draws its enumerators from lower level government staff. In the cities, their numbers are abysmally low. Besides, they are pretty indifferent to the important work they are assigned with. They know well that the voter information data generated by them, for all practical purposes, cannot be properly verified and they cannot be held accountable for errors that they create knowingly or unknowingly. With such a system, there is nothing surprising if the voters' list of the cities are created with error galore!

In India, urbanization is taking place at a very fast pace. The cities and the towns are where the job opportunities exist. People are constantly on the move to the cities.  Besides, a good majority of the urban dwellers in India live in rented accommodations and hence keep changing their places of residence quite often.

It is practically impossible for the ECI to make any reliable voters' list for the urban population of India under such a scenario with the present system of voter id or voters' list making and updating!

The authorities now say that the photo ID cards of the ECI is no more a mandatory document for voting. Citizens are allowed to use other photo id cards instead. But no one can vote unless he or she knows where to vote  and where his or her name appears in the voters' list.

The method of making the voters' list, especially for the urban areas is highly unscientific. The cities keep changing their faces due to rapid urbanization. But the ECI with their temporary workforce from the state government employee pool, has no facilities for updating the information in accordance with the fast changes. As a result, their data base and the actual ground reality do not match.

The net result is either elimination of a good number of urban people from the voters' lists or duplication of names in many lists without the actual voter ever getting aware of it.

Naturally, the actual numbers of people who go for voting gets greatly reduced. Moreover, no citizen with some respectable standing in society would like to get identified as a fake voter and face legal actions by trying their luck at the polling booths. When the the voters as per the voter list do not turn out for voting in large numbers due to the reasons I have mentioned, an opportunity gets created for some at least to manipulate the votes with the connivance of some pliable polling officials!

Unless the ECI think and evolve better solutions, the situation would remain as such. While people who never move out of their places would cast their votes, the literate and educated lots who have to shift their residences quite often would not cast their votes any time!(Exceptions would be the high ranking political functionaries and high ranking bureaucrats who are required to exhibit their responsibility in public under full media glare!) 

If you are a person who lives in the Indian cities and shift your residence every couple of years you are perhaps one who is not likely to cast your vote in India.

But if you have managed to get your name in the voters' list and managed to vote even with these constraints, you should share your method of doing that. It would be a great help to others like you.

Will you be voting this time?

If you do not vote, what would be your excuse?

Would you like to share your experiences in this context?

Do you have some suggestions to the ECI?

If your state or the nation enact a law that makes non voting a punishable offence, just as the Gujarat State has recently done, what would be your reaction? Is it justifiable for any government to punish its citizens for failure to play their part when the government fails to play its its part well?

I have a suggestion to the ECI and the government(s) of India. If they do not have the departmental infrastructural ability to manage things well, why don't they think of outsourcing these services to private players who meet certain well defined eligibility criteria? After all, India has moved away from its old policies of state owned enterprises to embrace and accept private participation and enterprise. When it can happen in all other areas, why not in the area of election management?

Two Plus Two Need Not Be Four For Everyone Now!

Long ago, when I began my professional career as an engineer in a large iron and steel company, I was posted as the engineer in charge of a water utility plant of the steel plant's captive thermal power plant.

When I joined, the plant facility was a new one under erection expected, to be commissioned for production in a few months time.

As a fresh chemical engineering post graduate from a premier engineering university of India, my knowledge in the practice of engineering was practically zero. While being engineering students in the graduation and post graduation levels, we were exposed to several units of study materials from which we acquired bits and pieces of information and knowledge in varying degrees. Our lecturers and professors were mostly good in making us exposed to some aspects of the information already available in the form of internationally accepted text books. They also made us undertake various practicals in well defined pedagogy. The authorized university authorities under the authority given to them by the statutes, tested us as per their procedures and awarded us the degree certificates which essentially provided us the license to get employed as engineers.

But each one of us understood engineering in a different manner. It was not a simple 'two plus two equals four' for us. Each one of us would be going to realize engineering differently in our later years!

Unfortunately or fortunately, those like us who started their profession as working engineers also realized the content of engineering differently in accordance with the work culture and work requirements of their own working areas. In other words, every one understood two plus two of engineering differently! Perhaps in the later years some of our kind added our own concepts and ideas and contributed to the creation of several pieces of non material creations on the face our earth. But we could never agree to any thing that we created as perfect or defect free!

Extending that analysis further down, I would be able to prove some thing which many of my readers might not agree. In my humble opinion, such a thing happens because of our imperfection of mind development.

We keep arguing over our discoveries, theories, inventions and ideas. We argue, because we cannot possibly agree on anything as perfectly alright. 

Let me now come back to the story of my initial days of work as the plant operation and maintenance engineer-in-charge. 

I found that there were several imperfections and defects in the plant which was planned by a reputed engineering consultancy group and executed by a reputed EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contracting company. Those imperfections existed in my view point. Had those imperfections were not there, the plant would have been easier for my group to operate and maintain. That was what I thought. Those imperfections were going to have much headache to me in the future. I remember my struggles with the consultants and the EPC contractors to rectify the issues which were defects in my view point. I could only succeed partially.

Some years later, my role changed. From the role of a plant operation and maintenance in-charge, I was made as a plant design engineer in our company's in house project engineering consultancy group. By chance, I got an opportunity to independently plan another new water utility plant for another purpose in the steel plant. 

I took all the pains to plan one of the best possible plant design which did not cause any of the problems that I faced. The plant was erected and commissioned smoothly and was handed over to a different group of plant operation and maintenance engineers. I was expecting the new custodians of the plant giving me the praise for giving them such a wonderfully designed plant.

I was wrong. The new custodian engineers of this plant expected the plant to be in a different way than what I thought. There was no logic in what they were demanding according to my thoughts. Obviously, when I honestly considered two plus two as four in this case, my counterparts on the other side were not agreeing! 

All of us find these kinds of conflicts every where in our day to day life. 

We find it in hour families. The wife may not agree with the husband's idea or vice versa. When ideas and opinions do not match, it becomes a potential source for conflicts and might develop in to full scale aggravations. 

Adolescents and youths would seldom agree with their parents' ideas because of the wide difference in the maturity levels that exist between them.

In an evolutionary world of progress like that of our earth, each and every person exist with varying degrees of perfection levels. All are imperfect with regard to knowledge, experience, wisdom and maturity. We can say that all exist under varying degrees of perfection or imperfection.

God is the only one who is eternally and infinitely perfect.  God cannot personally know imperfection as His own experience. Experiencing the outcomes of imperfection is left to us!

In a way, we are better than God in this context, because we have the experience of imperfection while God does not have it directly. God has to gain the experience of imperfection from us.

In fact, God shares the consciousness of all the experience of imperfectness of all the struggling men and women of not only earth, but also of all the evolutionary worlds of the universe. 

God desires that all those imperfect evolutionary beings like us gradually mature to attain perfection through life experiences and become true sons and daughters of God who are fully willing to live according to the will of God.

Learning by experimentation and experience is better than learning by other means. We learn the comparative desirability of beauty when we are able to recognize ugliness. We understand the desirability of good when evil also is experienced.

God actually participates and is in touch with all human beings in their struggle of attaining perfection through their life experiences under situations of imperfections. We may not be aware of His presence within us.

Human limitations which are the causes of potential evil should not be construed as part of the divine nature God.

Evil is a potential outcome of the imperfections of free-willed beings like we humans. God does not cause evil nor He likes evil. 

Because of our misunderstandings arising out of our present imperfections, there is a possibility that we may attribute good and evil both as a result of God's will. 

If I say that is not the case, all of us are not going to agree anyway.

Because, there are many among us for whom two plus two is not four, yet. Till every one attains the peak practical level of knowledge and maturity, our problems of our own make, arising out of our misunderstandings will remain. And we keep on experiencing the contrasts of good and evil to conclude the desirability of good over evil, perhaps at some distant future!