Gandhinagar: Gujarat government’s high-profile Kalpasar department has taken strong objection to the failure of a high-level experts committee, formed early last year, to make a complete survey of industries that have been polluting the Gulf of Khambhat. Responsible for building the Kalpasar reservoir by damming the Gulf, its secretary M S Patel has writ-ten a strongly-worded letter to principal secretary, industries, Maheshwar Sahu that untreated effluents are being allowed to be discharge into to the Gulf, and nothing is being done about it. 

The letter says industrial units along the Gulf continue to “divert their polluted effluents directly to sea or through estuarine portion of river through various pipeline networks”, adding, “The present quality of the effluent water is not satisfying the required quality standards.” Asking the industries department to “properly monitor” the situation, the letter says the discharge would jeopardise the plan to come up with one of the biggest sweet water reservoir projects. Chief minister Narendra Modi wants the Kalpasar department to kick-start the project, costing about Rs 55,000 crore, before December 2012, when the Gujarat state assembly polls are due. 

The letter says, “An experts group for monitoring and ensuring desired inflow water quality in rivers for reservoir of Gulf of Khambhat Development Project (Kalpasar) under leadership of Dr S R Wate, senior scientist, NEERI, Nagpur, was constituted.” However, it underlines, till now the group has held just two meetings on January 6, 2010 and February 11, 2010 and has submitted just an inception report, which is not enough to meet the situation. In fact, the data collected by the committee is not even enough for “completion of Draft Final Report”.