Seechewal urges India parties to focus on environment

India’s most famous eco-activist Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal has appealed to political parties to make environment their chief election issue during the coming Lok Sabha polls.

He also wants the parties to prominently include the environment in their election manifestoes and to field candidates “who have a full understanding of the seriousness of the environmental problem”, reports Indian news agency, IANS.

Seechewal was profiled by Time magazine in 2008 among 30 global “Heroes of the Environment”.

His name has been mentioned in several speeches of the former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam to the European Union.

He has jumped into polluted rivulets and streams and cleaned them up with the help of his volunteers.

“Unplanned development in India has led to unhampered, illegal inflow of dirty domestic sewage of villages and cities and toxic wastes of factories into rivers and streams, which has utterly contaminated our natural water resources, killing humans as well as rare species of water creatures,” he told IANS.

Seechewal is described as India's river-cleanser, having started his mission against pollution by cleaning up Kali Bein, a 160-km rivulet in Sultanpur Lodhi in Punjab's Kapurthala district, around 200 km from capital Chandigarh.

The rivulet is linked to the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev.

Seechewal, along with his volunteers from the “Ek Onkar Charitable Trust” would jump into the muddy waters to clear the riverbed of water hyacinth and silt and also develop the rivulet's banks and build roads.

They recently built a temporary dam in Jalandhar district to stop the flow of industrial discharge into a natural stream.

“Venerable rivers like the Ganga, Yamuna, Satluj, Kaveri, Narmada, Godavari, Damodar and others have become the most polluted rivers of India.

“No more life-givers, they have turned into harbingers of death. It is a matter of great shame that this dirty and toxic water is used to prepare prasad and for taking a bath at holy places situated on the banks of these rivers. This hurts the religious feelings of worshippers,” he said.

He said this contamination of river water is “an open and severe infringement” of the Indian constitution in letter and spirit.