Environmental status of Puri town during Rathyatra

Puri, the holy city of Lord Jagannath is situated on the eastern coast of India on the shores of Bay of Bengal . The city with its glorious ancient history, religious sanctity, architectural splendor, sea-scape beauty, one of the finest beach in world, coolish temperature and moderate climate holds a wealth of attraction for the visitors. Out of the twelve main festivals of Lord Jagannath, Rathyatra or Car festival is the most important. The deities Jagannath, Balabhadra, Subhadra and Sudarshana are brought from the main temple and placed in three chariots and pulled by the devotees Sri Gundicha temple on the Grand Trunk road covering a distance of about 3 Km. About 7-8 lakhs of people come from different places of world to Puri town to witness this festival. Such huge gathering will have an obvious impact on the environment of Puri town with respect to air, water and noise due to increased transportation activities, mass bathing, generation of huge quantity of municipal solid waste and waste water, noise produced by vehicles, musical instruments and microphones etc. The Board, had carried out a series of investigations during Pre-Rathyatra , Rathyatra and post Rathyatra in this aspect with the following objectives.

•  To assess the change in water quality of the five ponds of religious importance viz. Narendra, Indradyumna, Markanda, Swetaganga and Parvati Sagar due to mass bathing during Rathyatra.

•  To assess change in ground water quality, ambient air quality, noise level of Puri town during Rathyatra

BOD in the ponds were observed to exceed the prescribed standard of 3.00 mg/l for bathing waters during Rathyatra and also even during pre-Rathayatra period. During Rathyatra period, the total coliform as well as fecal coliform bacteria population increases significantly in all ponds. Narendra Pokhari exhibits very high coliform bacteria population (11,000 MPN/ 100 ml) during Rathyatra.

Inorganic parameters like chloride, sulphate, phosphate and nitrate were observed to vary within the range 88-272 mg/l, 4.65-63.91 mg/l, 0.07-2.368 mg/l and 0.345-7.802 mg/l respectively, which are well within the acceptable limit for bathing water. No adverse impact on the ground water quality due to Rathyatra, was observed .

The AAQ results indicates an expected increase in the conc. Of Suspended Particulate Matter( SPM) at the monitoring stations. However, it is noteworthy that the relative increase in SPM is most pronounced(about 360% compared to Pre Rathauatra value) at the sea beach rather than the main areas connected with the festival (i.e. the relative increase at Badadanda is about 218%).

The noise level( dB(A) Leq ) at bus atnd,Badadanda areas during Rathayatra period were observed to be 72.9 and 83.5 against the pre Rathayatra Periord 54.3 and 69.2 respectively during day time.

Monitoring of water quality of Brahmani river at the upstream of Rengali to assess the suitability of fish propagation

Board has conducted a study to assess the suitability of water quality at the upstream of Rengali for fish propagation. The prescribed parameters for Class-D i.e. pH, DO, free ammonia, carbon dioxide were monitored. From the results it is observed that the values of all parameters are well within the limit at all locations except marginal increase of carbon dioxide concentration at Panposh D/s on one occasion .