The annual ‘Kanwar Yatra’ ended on July 15 with Haridwar witnessing a rush of record number of devotees who come to collect water from the Ganga. The unprecedented rush also left behind a mountain of garbage — over 28,000 metric tons of waste, nearly five times more than the total waste generated in the city in a month.
Senior Superintandant of Police (SSP), Haridwar, Ajay Singh, told The Hindu that a total of 4.07 crore kanwariyas visited Haridwar in the 12 days of the yatra that started on July 4. Over 46 lakh vehicles reached Haridwar between July 4 and 15.
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The yatra also reported 13 deaths of kanwariyas, mostly due to accidents and drowning. As many as 696 people went missing during the mela at Haridwar of whom 667 people were reunited by the police.
Elaborating on the mechanism of calculating the number of kanwariyas arriving at Haridwar, Mr. Singh said the area and capacity of ghats is calculated along with the parking capacity in the town. The police also analyses the parking spaces in the city and outskirts as kanwariyas collect water and leave, so everyday, there are 90% new vehicles which enter the city.
“We estimate that each kanwariya remains at the ghat for an hour or two. With the help of CCTVs installed at ghats, we analyse when the ghats are full. This is checked at frequent intervals,” said Mr. Singh. Police barricades at all entrance points in the city also track the number of people coming in, he said.
“We cannot say that this 4.07 crore figure is accurate, but it is an accurate estimation. The government is also in the process of taking help from IIT Roorkee to use Artificial Intelligence to track crowds,” the SSP added.
Meanwhile, Municipal Commissioner, Haridwar, D.N. Saraswati, said the 27,810 metric tons waste generated in the town in the 12 days doesn’t include data from other parts of the district like Roorkee, Laksar, Rishikesh.
The total waste generation of the town, on normal days, is 200 metric tons per day. “We were prepared for this had a plan in place. Most of the cleaning was done at night. The civic body also started cleaning the ghats, from 2 p.m. on Saturday, when the rush was subsided,” added Mr. Saraswati,
Anoop Nautiyal a social worker and founder of Social Development for Communities (SDC) Foundation believes that the waste generation estimation of the civic body was “grossly underestimated”.
“The Kanwar Yatra is a stretch of over 200 km and devotees, who walk for three to 10 days, remain on roads only spending maximum a day or two, at Haridwar. There is no mechanism to calculate the waste they had generated during their entire journey, so this figure of 28,000 metric tons is just a part of total waste generation that takes place during this yatra,” Mr. Nautiyal said.
He also pointed out that apart from the solid and plastic waste that largely flows into the Ganga, there is also the challenge of feacal waste during the Kanwar Yatra.
“It is estimated that on average, humans generate 125 grams of feacal waste daily. A simple back of the envelope calculation based on the number of kanwariyas staying locally for two to three days tells us that there is a likelihood that an additional 10,000 to 15,000 metric tons would have been generated. Where and how human excreta is getting disposed of in a scientific manner is a question that authorities need to answer,” he added.
Mr. Nautiyal said that there is an acute need to sensitize the millions of kanwariyas, and others who visit the State, on appropriate waste reduction and disposal practices. If not, Uttarakhand is likely to sink in the mammoth waste being generated by its rapidly growing population and the crores of pilgrims and tourists thronging the State.
