Yamuna cleaning machine sent back

'Lack of proper planning led to failure'

 Authorities have given up on a Rs 4.5 crore machine for cleaning the surface of river Yamuna in Delhi – just months after it was unveiled with much fanfare.

The ‘trash skimmer’ machine was introduced in May to rid the polluted Yamuna of flowing solid waste in the river at Chhath Ghat, by Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti and Delhi Water Minister Kapil Mishra while launching the Yamuna Action Plan-III.

It was one of the main attractions of the plan as the machine had a capacity to remove 10 tonne of waste such as religious items, plastic, cans, and fast growing weeds like water hyacinth. Both Bharti and Mishra had promised to bring more such machines in the near future.

However, instead of doing that, the operations of the only machine that was working at the ‘ghat’ have been stopped and it has been sent back to its contractor, a month after it was brought as “it wasn't giving the desired results”, according to DJB officials.

“There was no point of the machine. It was dumping the waste just at the bank and nobody was picking it up. The waste eventually used to flow back into the river,” said a senior official of the Delhi Jal Board (DJB).

While it is the job of the municipal corporations to collect waste from the area, officials and people operating the machine said that the civic agency was not keen to do it.

“The waste got decayed by sitting there for days and whenever it used to rain, it flowed back into the river. The MCD was not told to collect it every day," said Nasir, a diver at Chhath Ghat, who used to operate the machine along with others. He worked on it for about a month, before it was taken away.

There was a lack of integrated planning and communication between different agencies. It was never handed over to the Delhi government,” the official said.

Another official, however, said that the machine was brought by the Centre just “to showcase” at the inauguration ceremony from Varanasi where it was already working and was sent back there few days after the event.

Nasir also said that there were other problems with the machine like its speed was slow as compared to its weight.

At a time when Yamuna is choking with raw sewage and waste and new schemes to make it pollution free are being announced every day, ill-conceived plans going down the drain is the last thing the river needs.

Earlier, the ambitious project of creating a 'Special Purpose Vehicle' (SPV) announced by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to give the river a new lease of life has not moved forward. Over last many years, several action plans and other projects costing over Rs 900 crore have failed and the SPV, which was to function on the lines of Delhi Metro was being touted as the one stop solution to clean the Yamuna.