Sant Seechewal tech to Save Ganga

Seechewal (Punjab): Eco warrior Balbir Singh Seechewal, who hogged the global limelight by reviving the almost dead 160-km-long Kali Bein, a rivulet sacred to Sikhism, and developing low-cost community-managed micro-sewage technologies, is now a ray of hope to rejuvenate India's longest river - the Ganga.

Every week, village heads settled along the Ganga visit this village near Jalandhar town to understand the sewage technologies and to replicate them in their respective villages. The visits are part of the Central government's ambitious Rs 20,000 crore ($3 billion) Clean Ganga project.

"We are educating the visiting villagers on how to collect the domestic sewage for simple treatment in open ponds by natural methods and then reuse it for irrigating the fields," 55-year-old Sant Seechewal, as he is better known, said in an interview.

Wearing his trademark maroon robes, the only Asian winner of TIME Magazine's Hero of Environment award explained that the cost of setting up the treatment tanks and supplying the treated water to the fields through a pipeline is low compared to the use of electrical water pumps that heavily drain out underground water.

Moreover, he said, the treatment techniques that have been adopted by more than 150 villages in Punjab, including 100 located on the Kali Bein, ensures that no polluted water flows into the surface water channels. According to him, a village with a population of 14,000 to 15,000 requires a treatment plant on 27 acres of land. However, for bigger towns and cities this model will not work. They need sewerage treatment plants.