Agra builds monument to clean sewage

NEW DELHI: An emperor once built one of the world’s costliest tombs in Agra to immortalize his beloved Today, the city administration is building one of the costliest water treatment plants in the country to supply a town that attracts over two million tourists every year to see the Taj Mahal.

Agra suffers the reality of be ing located along the Yamuna downstream of polluting cities like Delhi and Mathura. By the time the river meanders into the city, it is more a putrid, dead sewage canal. If the river had reasonably clean water, the city administration would have needed a treatment plant costing between Rs 20 lakh and 30 lakh, enough to process 1 million litres per day. But the level of contamination requires such sophisticated technology to make the water usable that Agra would end up paying almost four times the normal cost, at Rs 1 crore for every million litres of water treated daily.

The city’s hopes lie in sourcing water from the Ganga instead, through a 140-km pipeline with the project costing more than Rs 1,000 crore. It is still under construction. A rather expensive new-age monument, but the city is paying for others’ pollution upstream.

That does not mean Agra behaves any better than any other downstream city. The city’s sewage network covers less than 20% of its area—and drains that do exist are only partly functional. Ironically, it has sewage treatment plants that sit idle—there are no drains to take the sewage to the locations.

So, much of the sewage that Agra’s 2crore annual tourist traffic and 15.75 lakh citizens generate every year flows into the Yamuna untreated. Agra may be home to a timeless beauty, but it’s costly civic nightmare.