Chief Secretary S.K. Joshi on Monday asked officials to come up with a draft action plan on river rejuvenation, duly fixing time lines before Jan. 15 as directed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT).
Chairing the River Rejuvenation Committee meeting here, he told the officials of irrigation, groundwater, metro water works, municipality and industries departments to handover their data pertaining to different rivers in the State to the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) by January 5. He asked the officials to prepare a watershed map for the entire State. He suggested monitoring of water quality as part of the long term plan with special care 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.
Further, he wanted the officials to submit proposals for appointing Hyderabad Metro Water Works as nodal agency for constructing sewerage treatment plants at the earliest. Besides, 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 decided to hold another round of deliberations on the draft report given by NEERI.
Special Chief secretary Ajay Misra, Principal Secretaries Arvind Kumar, Jayesh Ranjan, Metro Water Works Managing Director M. Dana Kishore, Member Secretary PCB Satyanarayana Reddy, EPTRI Director General Kalyan Chakravarthy, TSIIC MD E.V. Narsimha Reddy, Engineer-in-Chief (Irrigation) C. Muralidhar and others attended the meeting.
