By Asish Mehta
Post News Network
Cuttack, Jan 4: The rivers Mahanadi and Kathjodi are turning into rivers of waste and the administration is turning a blind eye to this, much in contrast to officials leaving no stone unturned in cleaning the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh.
Temporary homes have proliferated on the banks of the Mahanadi and Kathjodi and this has led to the rampant dumping of garbage into the rivers.
Deepak, who has built a temporary house on the bank of the Mahanadi, admits that his family dumps garbage there. However, he blames the state government for not providing houses for the poor in the town. “We are too poor to afford a house in the city,” he said.
The waste is being dumped in the rivers in gross violation of environmental regulations that protect the quality of streams, lakes, and wetlands from solid waste in the form of trash, litter, and garbage that often ends up in these waters.
Several factories that are located on the banks of the Mahanadi are also continuously discharging their effluents into the river. An employee of a beverage unit in Jagatpur admitted that the factory dumps its sewage in the Mahanadi.
Madhav, a resident of the area, also said that factories in the region dump their waste in the river. “The workers of various factories dump the waste in the river every night so that no one catches them in the act,” he said. Besides, effluents also pour into the river from these industrial units.
However, elected officials of the Cuttack Municipal Corporation did not comment on the steps that the administration is taking to stop the dumping of garbage in the two rivers.
The Mahanadi, which flows through the states of Chhattisgarh and Orissa, drains an area of around 141,600 sq km.
The river traverses Cuttack district in an east-west direction. Just before entering Cuttack, there is a large distributary called Kathjodi. Cuttack stands on the spit separating the two channels. The Kathjodi then throws off many streams such as the Kuakhai, Devi and Surua, which meet the Bay of Bengal after entering Puri district.
