In developing countries farmers are forced to use the raw ‘sewage’ for irrigating their lands, that too, mainly
for watering vegetable cultivation. In view of recurring monsoon failures and abnormal population growth in developing countries, the people have to resort to irrigate their lands with sewage. The farmers have no clean water, nor any other alternative water source.
About 70% cities in the developing countries, only
sewage water is available for use for irrigating their lands to grow mainly vegetables. According to recent Global Water Conference held in Sweden, using raw sewage water could be a big
health hazard among the entire population.
The study by the International Water Management Institute indicates that the use of sewage in such a magnitude could threaten spread of epidemics. The study states further that irrigating with sewage water is in vogue in few of the poorest countries where already people lack hygiene and sanitation.
According to a researcher, it is a wide spread phenomenon prevalent in about 20 million hectares of land across the developing world especially in Asian regions like China, Vietnam and India but also nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and many Latin American Cities.
The U.N. has named 2008 as ‘The International Year of Sanitation’. More than 2500 scientists, politicians and officials from 140 countries attended ‘The World Water Week” on Sunday the 17th August, 2008. A conference convened by the U.N. in this regard where the experts informed that more than 1.4 million die every year from diarrhea related diseases and poor hygiene conditions and termed it as ‘Global Sanitation Crisis’.
This is definitely an environmental problem threatening the entire world. Ever increasing demand for water for irrigating the crops has increased the dependence on sewage water. Moreover, the poor farmers can not afford to spend on treatment of sewage water, since it involves heavy planning and huge funding to treat sewage.
In fact, Illiterate and poor farmers grow vegetables and cereals commonly with contaminated sewage water. We can not ignore the fact the sewage is providing a permanent livelihood to major portion of farmers. Nearly 200000 families are engaged in this profession. At the same time, we can not ignore the environmental and hygiene hazards attached to this type of irrigation.
The use of large quantity of waste water for agricultural purpose is thus both helping and hurting the agrarian community. Urban waste water is contaminated and includes the following:
1. Domestic effluents (black water-excreta, urine etc.,)
2. Grey water (water from kitchen, sinks etc.,)
3. Industrial Effluents (Water from Hospitals, Industries etc.,)
4. Strom water (Other run-off water)
Treating and cleaning the sewage water is very big task and only the governmental agencies can undertake such big schemes. Of course, many such big projects are being implemented world over. But, especially in developing world the scenario is alarming and nearly 45% of the project cost goes towards corruption.
Hence, if there is a controlling body of persons of eminence drawn from all walks of life; we can implement such big project without corrupting any one. Thus, we can maintain complete transparency and openness in the implementation of the scheme. Everyone will be happy to have a controlling agency.
The developed countries should constitute a ‘Consortium’ to help the developing countries to overcome the epidemic and environmental problems created by the use of sewage water irrigation.
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