NEW DELHI, India, July 6, Reuter: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi today told a conference of environmentalists the water of India’s holiest river, the now polluted Ganges will be fit enough o drink by 1989.
Gandhi, attending a south Asian conference of World Commission on environment and development, said a comprehensive pollution control law had been drawn up and the Ganges would be cleaned to make its water potable.
The 2,510 km long Ganges, which flows from the Western Himalayas across northern India to the Bay of Bengal, is sacred to Hindus, but is polluted along much of its length by industrial and human waste.
Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland told the same conference the developed and the developing countries should together fight major threats to the world environment.
Brundtland, who heads the World Commission, said: “While economic and social development suffers from. Severe national and global imbalance, threats to the environment have grown to become issues of survival”.
“The risks inherent in many modern industrial processes have reached beyond the intolerable. In this country the tragedy of Bhopal has left lasting impacts”, she added, referring to the 1984 lethal gas leak at a central Indian pesticide plant which killed more than 2000 people.
Brundtland, who arrived in New Delhi today for a three-day visit, presented the Commission’s final report entitled “Our Common Future”, to South Asian governments.
The report highlights the dangers of continuing current patterns of development and industrialization and calls for international recognition and cooperation to fight threats to the global environment.
The Norweigian leader told a news conference the rich countries of the north as well as industnalized countries of the east should cooperate in halting environmental deterioration in their own interest as well as a moral obligation to the children of the future:
Article extracted from this publication >> July 10, 1987
