Draft action plan on river rejuvenation by Jan 15

Hyderabad: Chief Secretary Dr S K Joshi instructed the officials to come up with a draft action plan on river rejuvenation duly fixing timelines before January 15th as per the orders of the National Green Tribunal.

Presiding over the River Rejuvenation committee meeting today, he directed the officials of irrigation, ground water, metro water works, municipality and industries department to handover their data pertaining to the different rivers in the state to national environmental engineering research institute (NEERI) before the 5th of January. He asked the officials to prepare a watershed map for the entire state. He also suggested monitoring of water quality as part of long term plan. Special care should be taken on important stretches to prevent river pollution.

The pollution control board should monitor the water quality while the irrigation department should conduct a study on water levels of all the rivers in the state. Proposals for appointing Hyderabad Metro water works as nodal agency for constructing sewerage treatment plants should be submitted, he said. Reports should be prepared for minimum hydrological environment flow for the entire season. It should include domestic sewerage, ground water, ecological and environmental flow and flood plain zones. It was also decided to hold another round of deliberations on the draft report given by NEERI.

Special Chief secretary Ajay Mishra, Principal Secretaries Arvind Kumar, Jayesh Ranjan, Metro water works MD Dana Kishore, Member Secretary PCB Satyanarayana Reddy, EPTRI Director General Kalyan Chakravarthy, TSIIC MD Narasimha Reddy, ENC Irrigation Muralidhar Rao and other officials attended the meeting.