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Minister of Environment and Forests Thiru A. Raja has called for a determined and proactive National Wetland Conservation Strategy and Action Plan with adequate support of legal instruments.
Releasing two books namely "Inland Wetlands of India - A Conservation Priorities" and "Inland Wetlands of India - A Conservation Atlas" brought out by Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), here today, Thiru Raja said that the Government is committed to add many more wetlands sites, which are vastly rich in biodiversity, as nationally and internationally important sites.
Quoting the study done by SACON, Thiru Raja noted that “there has been a loss of about 38% of wetlands across the country, since the last 10 years. And, in some districts the loss is up to 88%. Compounding the loss of wetlands, almost all the wetlands from 14 States appear to be polluted”, adding that “in many cases, the fishes are not fit for human consumption, because of the high levels of heavy metals or pesticides. It is a cause for great concern that not even one of the over 1700 fishes studied from 170 wetlands was free from pesticides/ heavy metal”.
The Minister further observed that “the wetlands appear to be one of the most preferred landfills for dumping solid wastes from a variety of origin and an ultimate end point for discharging industrial and domestic untreated effluents”.
Citing example of one of the wetlands at Pallikaranai in Tamil Nadu, Thiru Raja pointed out that 3,500 tonnes of municipal waste is dumped everyday in this wetland, which also harbours the most precious germplasm of a wild variety of rice, Oryza ruifipogon. “Blissfully, ignorant of this fact, 32 million litres of domestic effluent is also discharged everyday”, he added.
“Apart from filling the wetland and contaminating the water body, such wastes pollute the air; the waste containing plastic origin is burnt in many cases. One of the studies shows that the human milk in some such areas contains ‘dioxine’, a deadly carcinogenic chemical, which got into the air because of the burning of plastics”, he observed.
AKS/rs
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