Sirsa river facing ecological disaster.

• Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective, a Himachal Pradesh-based watchdog, has asked the River Rejuvenation Committee and the Special Environment Surveillance Task Force to look into ecological issues facing the Sirsa river, a tributary of the Satluj river.
• In a memorandum to state-level bodies set up by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), Himdhara has highlighted that industrial effluents from Baddi, Barotiwala and Nalagarh industrial areas in Solan district, the discharge from a common effluent treatment plant, illegal dumping of garbage and unlawful sand mining are the chief sources of threat to the Sirsa river.
• The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in its report “River Stretches for Restoration of Water Quality” identified 351 polluted stretches on 323 rivers.
• In Himachal, seven river stretches have been identified as “critically polluted” where the “biological oxygen demand” levels of the rivers are above permissible limits. These rivers are: Sukhana, Markanda, Sirsa, Ashwani, stretches of the Beas, Giri and Pabbar.
• Following the release of the CPCB report, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) issued order to states to form the River Rejuvenation Committees for identifying the sources and nature of pollution of rivers and make time-bound action plan for reviving them.
• The River Rejuvenation Committee for Himachal comprises of the Director of Urban Development Department and teams from IIT Kanpur and National Institute of Hydrology in Roorkee.
• The committee has to identify nature and sources of pollutants, device an action plan to mitigate the pollution and revive the health of the river in collaboration with the State Pollution Control Board for implementation of the plan.
• “This is a very critical order of the NGT and perhaps goes to show that the crisis has assumed huge proportions because today almost 80 to 90 per cent of our surface water sources are lost”.
• The common effluent treatment plant in Kenduwal village in Baddi has failed to address the problem of pollution.
• Thousands of litres of effluents find way to the Sirsa river every day, causing great damage to the aquatic life and leading to fish kills.
• The memorandum highlighted the issue of municipal garbage dumping on the floodplains of the Sirsa river in violation of the Solid Waste Management Rules of 2016.
• Sand mining has been most detrimental to the health of the Sirsa, impacting the flow of the river and causing structural damage to the bridges across the river. It is shocking that the NGT order in 2013 banning sand mining on river beds has been grossly violated.
• The memorandum has sought inclusion of testing for heavy metals like arsenic and mercury in the samples for water quality.

Sirsa, a lifeline once, now spells doom :

 Sirsa River is a river near Anandpur Sahib, enters Himachal Pradesh state in the Solan District near Baddi and flows straight into Punjab and finally meets Sutlej near Ropar. The major tributary of the river is Balad Nadi at Baddi and Chikni Khad near Nalagarh with minor tributaries as Chotta Kafta Nallah, Pula Nallah, Jattawala Nalla, Sandholi Nallah, etc. in Baddi Bartotiwala region.

The ground water level in the valley of River Sirsa is shallow and varies on an average from 5.5 meters to 6.3 meters near the riverbed and increases towards the hills. The tributaries like Balad Nadi, Ratta Nadi remain dry except during monsoon season and ground water is the only water source for domestic, agricultural and industrial use.

The Sirsa river in the Shiwalik foothills of Himachal, which flows into the Satluj, has been reduced to a drain carrying toxic industrial effluents of the Baddi Barotiwala Nalgarh Industrial hub, over the last ten years. The river has several villages located along its banks that have been impacted as a result of untreated effluents and toxic water being drained into it by more than 2000 industrial units in the region. The worst affected were the Gujjars, a pastoral community dependent on rearing cattle and buffaloes.