Centre, Punjab to jointly work on cleaning up Ludhiana's Buddha Nullah

The Centre and Punjab will jointly work to find an enduring solution to the widespread pollution in the Buddha Nullah, a Sutlej tributary that passes through Ludhiana.

For this, the Union Government will constitute a multi-level team of experts and officers from both the Centre and the state. The team will conduct a spot visit of one of the most polluted water bodies before deliberating on cleaning it and plugging the sources of pollution flow in future.

These decisions were taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Secretary, Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, Debashree Mukherjee in New Delhi on Monday evening. The Centre had called a meeting of all state and field-level officers involved in the Rs 840-crore Buddha Nullah rejuvenation project besides the functionaries from the Central ministries, departments concerned and the environmental enforcement agencies at the Centre and the state level.

“The meeting, which lasted for over an hour, discussed the current scope and status of ongoing work to rejuvenate the Sutlej tributary, besides working out a permanent and long-lasting solution to the problem,” a senior official privy to the development told The Tribune over the phone from New Delhi.

Debashree Mukherjee asked the Central and state authorities to suggest a workable and viable solution to check the widespread pollution in the Sutlej tributary, which is part of the longest of the five rivers that flow through Punjab in northern India and Pakistan.

She directed to launch an online monitoring system for the sewage treatment plants and common effluent treatment plants linked to Buddha Nullah to provide real-time data on the quality of the treated water, flow rate and equipment status.

It was also decided to hold another round of meeting on the issue next month after conducting spot visit and constitution of the multi-level joint team of experts.