The purity of Godavari water, or sanitation on its banks at various pushkar ghats in Adilabad, is inversely proportional to the sanctity and holiness attached with the river. This is a major cause of concern which has surprisingly been ignored by the government, though it has begun preparations for the event to take place in July next year.
The Godavari Pushkaralu will be held at the bathing ghats at Basar, Soan in Nirmal mandal, Gudem near Luxettipet, in Mancherial and Chennur. While water at Basar is highly muddied and murky owing to pollution, none of the other four places has enough water for devotees to have a holy dip, as water has not been discharged from the Sri Ram Sagar Project (SRSP) in Nizamabad.
There being deficient rainfall last monsoon, there’s hardly any flow in Godavari river which has rendered it a backwater reservoir of the SRSP. The water level is also precariously low not only near villages along the river banks, but in SRSP too where the current storage level is said to be about 30 tmcft.
The river will also not receive any major inflows until July 1, 2015, barely 14 days ahead of the Pushkaralu, when the gates of the controversial Babli project in Dharmabad of Maharashtra will be lifted. The inflows will be subject to a good beginning of monsoon next.
Thota Ramesh, a boatman in Basar, says even the present quantum of murky water will dry up in March-April. “The government can remove the silt which will increase the storage capacity of the river near the Pushkar ghats,” he opines.
But before that, Basar will see a heavy rush of devotees during Sankranti, Guru Pournami, Ugadi and other festivals. The polluted water is bound to pose health problems to the devotees, who invariably will take a holy dip, notwithstanding the quality or depth of water.
“We do not have a system to regularly monitor pollution in Godavari,” points out an Irrigation Department official when asked about the safety of the devotees. “The government can prevent pollution to a greater extent by desiltation and construction of silt arresting structures in the catchment of the SRSP,” he suggests.
