Honest to
god ,may piece on rally for rivers, in the last issues of business India, expectedly
elicited responses, with the bouquets
thankfully exceeding the brickbats.But some of the brickbats were really
vicious, Jaggi sadhguru obviously has staunch followers, who swear by him and
causes he espouses. And hate any ctitics
or detractors.
The most valuable inputs that I however
received were from Karminder Jit Singh Ghuman, professor, Thapar university
Patiala,who pointed me in the duection of Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal , know as
the man who restored a dead river. He sent
me a number of link and
bacgrounders about a relatively lesser known spiritual guru donning a saffron
robe who , along with a handful of his volunteers, took on a daunting mission
to clean up a polluted river and succeeded in transforming it beyond
imaginations after a couple of year sweat and toil.
Seechewal was invited 17 years ago to
attend a meeting in jalandhar, called by an NGO to deliberate on restoring the
highly polluted Kali Bein, a rivulet which originates in hoshiarour district
and merges into the river Beas after traversing a distance of
160km. Six towns and
many villages emptied their waste into the rivulet . When the baba learned
that Guru Nanak Dev, the founder
of Sikhism, had bathed in the rivulet during his over 14 year-long stay in
Sultanpur Lodhi, a town in Kapurthala
district about 13km from Seechewal ,he
was determined to restore the pristine
glory of the river.
In 2000, Seechewal got into river with a
handful of his sewadar(volunteers) to start the cleaning operations. Undeterred
by the mammoth task ahead, with his bare hands , he started pulling out the weeds and clearing the garbage from the slushy river bed . His
followers joined him in right earnest . As word spread, many children from the
villages joined his efforts. The locals, who
were indifferent initially ,also
began supporting the efforts. They gave their labour and offered their tractors to level the ground.
Seechewal himself was on the field
eighter driving the tractor , supervising or getting down on the dirty waters
pulling out the weeds. In a couple of
years times not only cleaned the river but had
even built bunks and
planted fruit and decorative trees on its banks.
But the challenge emerged later ,as sewage
from village located on the banks of the river conunued to enter the
watercourse . Repeated pleas to the
government to plug the sewage mlets tell on deaf ears. Sant Seechewal
rose to the occasion once again, mobilising his followers to design andig
enously developed sewerage system that included the laying of underground sewer
pipes in the villages, and putting in place a natural treatment system through a layer of trenches .The treated
sewage water was used to irrigate the agriculture fields. The system , in fact , came to be known as the seechewal
modal of sewage
treatment .The late A.P.J Abdul Kalam, former
president of India, was a big votary of the
seechewal model of sewage treatment and visited
Kali Bem twice in 2006 and 2008 . In Angust last year , Uma Barati, Union Minister for water
Resources, also visited the place to see whether she could replicated the model
on river Ganga. In 2008 ,Times magazine paid tribute to Sant Seechewal, "
Today , the Kali Bein is thriving . Families head there for picnics and the
devout bathe during religious festivals". The holy-man was honoured with a
padmashri earlier in 2017.
Sant Seechewal held no rallies for rivers;
got no one to give missed call; he
didn't drive anywhere in a fancy Merc; hed no entourages chasing him around the
country. He just got down to the task of
cleaning the hyacinth and silt from the enter river bed.
Sant Seechewal is a true patriot; and a
karmayogi. Jggi Sadhguru needs to meet up with thw Sant to imbine somw of the
learnings from thw kali bein project if his Rally for Rivers has to become a
pratical reality beyond the current publicity, according to 'Time magazine'
that ran a feature on him, one of Balbir Singh Seechewal's
favourite verses
from the 'Guru Granth Sahib the Sikh Holy book' venerates the elements.
"The wind is our guru", it reads, "Water is Fathe", and
"The Earth is our Mother with his selfless deeds, the Sant from Punjab has
paid patical tribute to his guru, his father And his mother. Could anyone ask
for more?
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| Sandeep Goyal Writter |
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