Putrid Rivers Of Sludge.(Cover Story: Who Is the Greenest of Them All?; SPECIAL REPORT)(India)

Byline: Jason Overdorf

Delhi's bureaucrats bicker over cholera and the role of city drains and state sewers.

India scores 120 on the green index and especially poorly in sanitation.

If anybody needed a reminder of how crippling bureaucracy can be, consider the campaign to clean up the sacred Yamuna River in Delhi. The river oozes through town like a putrid ribbon of black sludge. Its level of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times higher than what's deemed safe for bathing. After a half-billion-dollar, 15-year program to build 17 sewage treatment plants, raw sewage still spills into the river at the rate of 3.6 billion liters a day.

Lack of sanitation is one of India's many environmental problems. On Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index, it scores a miserable 21 on sanitation, compared with 67 for the region and 48 for its income group. That helps push the country's overall ranking to 120th, below all its income peers except Angola and Cambodia. Like China, India tends to suffer the ills of over- and underdevelopment. On the one hand, its power-starved, industrializing economy has prevented it from making substantial progress in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and has put further pressure on its ability to protect the biodiversity of its disappearing wilderness (in the EPI, the country fares poorly on both counts). On the other hand, desperate poverty leaves most of its population vulnerable to environment-related illnesses caused by water and air pollution, which together account for an estimated 20 percent of the disease burden. Illnesses related to air pollution alone cost India as much as $20 billion a year, according to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a Delhi think tank headed by climate scientist and Nobel laureate R. K. Pachauri.

India's messy democracy is particularly ill equipped to handle the conflicting pressures of rapid growth and poverty. Although the national water policy was revised in 2002 to encourage community participation and decentralize water management, the country's byzantine bureaucracy ensures that it remains a "mere statement of intent," according to TERI. Responsibility for managing the country's water resources is fragmented among a dozen different ministries and departments without any coordination. "You have multiple agencies with no synergy between them and no interaction between them," ...