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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Down the river, flotilla of dead fish
-The Telegraph
 
Not all dawns break like this for Mamata Das. Swept out of bed at 6am by ripples of excitement swirling outside her home, Mamata found herself wading into the Karala, the “Thames of Jalpaiguri”.

What else would you do when you wake up to news that lifeless fish after fish are bobbing up the river?

They floated down in all shapes, sizes and species — the boal, a catfish and a gourmet’s delight in many parts of Bengal, tangra, arh, American rohu, byne and puti. Some weighed 3 kilos, some 12.

“As soon as I heard about the fish at 6am, I went to the river and began collecting the fish. I took some for us and gave some to others,” said Mamata, a homemaker whose husband works as a construction labourer.

Then came the daylight knock. Alarmed that the fish may have died of some toxic substance, officials raided homes and seized the catch, some from boiling pots and frying pans.

Among those who had splashed into the river, called the local Thames because it bifurcates Jalpaiguri, were the sons of Harimohan Yadav, a day labourer.

The pieces of the boal his sons had gathered had just gone into the pot when the civic officials, alerted by a disaster management team, came calling. “We hardly get the chance to taste fish like boal and my sons had brought a fair-sized one,” Harimohan said. A kilo of the larger boal costs around Rs 400 and the smaller one Rs 200.

However, wiser counsel prevailed. “When the officials said we could fall ill, I handed the fish over,” Harimohan added.

Similar scenes unfolded in several houses along a 5km stretch of the embankment in the heart of Jalpaiguri, the poor neighbourhood nursing disappointment at the slip between the pot and the lip but some realising that they may have been pulled back from the jaws of a health disaster.

But not all of the thousands of fish that floated down the river had been seized. Till this evening, the impounded count stood at 38kg, far less than what had been scooped up in the morning.

The cause behind the mass death is yet to be established. Officials felt that someone could have thrown “some toxic chemical” into the river by accident. The officials added that they could not think of a motive why anyone would do so deliberately.

A pollution control board official said the pH level of the water indicated it had turned acidic because of contamination. The level of pH indicates hydrogen ion activity in a solution — the lower the level, the higher the acidity.

“The pH level of safe water is usually around 7.2 but I have found it to be below 4 here, which indicates the river water has been contaminated either by poison or some chemical. Further tests in our laboratory will confirm the actual source,” said Sukriti Lama, a pollution control scientist who arrived from Siliguri and collected samples.

Agreed Pallipuram Jayasankar, the director of the Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture, Bhubaneswar. “The observed pH of about 4 would mean something has turned the water acidic,” he said. “Fish cannot survive in acidic or low pH water.”

Aquaculture experts said mass fish mortality observed elsewhere in the past had been attributed to blooms of algae that secrete toxic substances but such algal blooms were not usually accompanied by high acidity levels.

Ecologists had earlier recorded fish deaths after discharge of effluents into flowing streams and rivers. Last year, mass mortality of fish along a 4km stretch of a tributary of the Nile was blamed on phenol and ammonia.

The chief medical officer of health of Jalpaiguri, Swapan Sarkar, said severe stomach ailments and nausea could result if anyone ate fish contaminated by some poison. “There could be vomiting and skin rashes if poisoned fish is eaten,” Sarkar said.

Police arrested three persons for catching and selling the dead fish.

A team of officials and police started entering homes around 9am to seize the fish. They used loudhailers to appeal to the people not to eat the fish. The residents were told not to use the river to bathe or wash clothes and utensils.

The assistant director of the fisheries department, Sonam Chewang, said the only way to ensure the stretch was completely free of toxicity was to ask the Teesta barrage authority to release water and flush out the suspect substance. The Teesta joins the river further downstream but an overhead duct links the two upstream.

“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that such an event has taken place. There are no chemical factories along the river and the pesticides used in the tea gardens cannot be the cause. It seems that a large quantity of some poison entered the river,” Chewang said.