It has been reported that the holy town of Haridwar has become immersed in a sea of garbage due to this year’s unprecedented gathering of kanwariyas, which is being purported to have exceeded 4 crores. According to a report in the Times of India, over the course of the 12-day Kanwar yatra, Haridwar has been overwhelmed by up to 30,000 metric tonnes (MT) of garbage.

According to Haridwar municipal commissioner Dayanand Saraswati, who spoke to the ToI, the area has been left littered with empty bottles, discarded clothing, plastic bags, and other trash, with at least 50% of the waste being plastic. Open defecation along the Ganga, which is usual during the Kanwar Yatra, made the pollution worse. Open defecation along the Ganga is estimated to have contributed approximately 10,000 tonnes of faecal waste into the river. It is anticipated that the total waste produced over the 12-day yatra in the neighbourhood will amount to 27,810 MT.

Commissioner Saraswati further stated that the authorities will need a few weeks in order to clean the whole city. As per the Outlook report, the Haridwar Municipal Corporation reportedly has arranged for 40 more garbage ferrying vehicles to their regular service for faster cleanup. He also informed the media that the cleaning process started on Saturday and continued by saying, “Round-the-clock cleaning of the Ganga ghats, roads, bridges, parking lots, and a temporary bus stand is being carried out. We have increased the number of workers to 600 for time-bound cleaning. We have also started spraying insecticides and fogging in the mela area.” 

It is being purported that the staggering amount of waste reproduced this year has put immense pressure on the town’s infrastructure and resources. Additionally, the seven-day rain spell in Uttarakhand during the Kanwar Yatra affected the proper garbage collection and disposal, said the officials as per a report by the Outlook. 

It is essential to note that dealing with large amount of waste production is not limited to this year, but has been an issue associated with the Yatra for many years. Last year too, the Kanwar Yatra season had generated about 30,000 MT of waste, a quantity that Haridwar typically produces in 4 to 5 months. 

Damage to this environment, local left dealing with the mess

The executive engineer of Jal Sansthan, Rakesh Chauhan, revealed that around 3.5 MLD (35 lakh litres) of human waste was handled at the plants during the event. Haridwar’s sewage treatment plants were overburdened during the yatra.

Haridwar resident Dr. Vijay Verma raised alarm about the pollution, telling ToI that “During the Kanwar Yatra, all directives from the courts and regulatory bodies aimed at safeguarding the environment seem to be disregarded. Urgent action is needed to address this pressing issue and protect our ecology.” 

As stated in a report by the Outlook, Mahamandaleshwar Hari Chetnanand Maharaj of Udasin Akhada reportedly said that according to old scriptures, if a pilgrim pollutes the sacred Ganga, ghats and other places of worship during their pilgrimage, it is not considered successful. He also said, “In Vedic scriptures even staying at Har-ki-Pauri or near revered shrines is not considered appropriate as the sanctity of such holy places gets affected. Devotees should ensure they do not commit any such unreligious act.”

According to a local priest by the name of Ujjwal Pundit, pilgrims and tourists need to be educated and made aware of the necessity to maintain the cleanliness of the Ganga and Haridwar. 

According to the reports, Activist Anoop Nautiyal shared his point of view to curb the pollution of the holy river and the pilgrimage areas, he said, “If such a huge amount of garbage is left at Ganga ghats, then it is a failure of local administration. …Segregation of garbage and waste material lying in the open amid rainy spells is impossible. So eventually it will go to landfill or dumping sites. Every year Kanwar pilgrimage is held so long-term planning is required…NGOs, experts on waste material management should also be roped in,” the Outlook report stated.

Related:

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Pollution Control Norms for Coal-Fired Power Plants Relaxed Despite Modi’s Commitment to Environment

The Kanwars : Infamous Shiv Bhakts of North India

Plea in Kerala HC alleging illegal encroachment in temple by RSS

Rampant hate speeches in Solapur, anti-Muslim sentiments spread

Is Prayagraj’s ‘Sant Sammelan’ just another edition of Haridwar’s infamous Dharma Sansad?

Dharm Sansad: Haridwar local courts deny bail to hate mongers

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A plastic waste dump. Mohameed Abdulraheem/shutterstock.com

On Dec. 18, we announced the winner: 90.5 percent, the amount of plastic that has never been recycled. Okay – but why is that such a big deal?

Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this year. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for a statistic they feel shines a light on today’s most pressing issues.

Last year’s winner was 69. That’s the annual number of Americans killed, on average, by lawn mowers – compared to two Americans killed annually, on average, by immigrant jihadist terrorists and the 11,737 Americans killed annually by being shot by another American. That figure, first shared in The Huffington Post, was highlighted in a viral tweet by Kim Kardashian in response to the proposed migrant ban.

This year’s statistic came into prominence from a United Nations report. The chair of the judges and RSS president, Sir David Spiegelhalter, said: “It’s really concerning that so little plastic has ever been recycled and, as a result, so much plastic waste has leached out into the world’s environment. It’s a great, growing and genuinely world problem.”

Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winning statistic. About 90.5 percent of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste produced since mass production began about 60 years ago is now lying around our planet in landfills and oceans or has been incinerated. If we don’t change our ways, by 2050, there will be about 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste.

When the panel first began looking at this statistic, I really didn’t have any comprehension of what billions of tons of plastic means. Based on a study from 2015 and some back of the envelope calculations, that’s the equivalent of 7.2 trillion grocery bags full of plastic as of 2018.

But again, I still didn’t quite have a feel for how much that actually is. People tend to use distance measurements to compare numbers, so I tried that. Assuming that a grocery bag of plastic is about 1 foot high, if you stacked the grocery bags, you could go to the moon and back 5,790 times. That’s starting to feel a bit more real.

In fact, if you could monetize all of the plastic trash clogging up our environment – including the 12 percent that is incinerated– you could buy some of the world’s biggest businesses.

Assuming it costs 3.25 cents to produce a plastic bottle, we can estimate that a grocery bag contains about US$1 of plastic material production. (I took a grocery bag and filled it with 31 bottles.) So 7.2 trillion grocery bags is the equivalent of a cool $7.2 trillion.

What can you buy with that? Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Exxon, GM, AT&T, Facebook, Bank of America, Visa, Intel, Home Depot, HSBC, Boeing, Citigroup, Anheuser-Busch, all the NFL teams, all the MLB teams and all the Premier League Football teams.
In other words, if someone could collect and recycle all the unrecycled plastic on earth, this person would be richer than any individual on the planet.

One of the most difficult aspects of statistics is putting the numbers into a context that we can wrap our heads around, into a format that means something to us. Whatever it is that speaks to you, all I can say is that this speaks to me. It’s clearly time to clean up our act.
 

Liberty Vittert, Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics, Washington University in St Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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