The Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) has asked the Meghalaya government to find out within three weeks why a river in the limestone and coal-rich East Jaintia Hills district turns “mysteriously blue”. The KSU deadline ends January 9.
In a memorandum to the district’s Deputy Commissioner E. Kharmalki, the local unit of the union said the Lukha river began turning blue every winter in 2007. Thousands of fish in the river have died and the water is no longer fit for drinking, it said.
The KSU blamed the change of the river’s colour to untreated effluents from cement factories but said it was up to the government to detect the cause and come up with a scientific solution for restoring the river.
The union reminded the district authorities of its complaint in 2012 about the changing colour of the Lukha river. “It is unfortunate that no concrete step has been taken till date,” it said.
Many studies, including one by the North East Hill University have been undertaken to get to the bottom of the change in the river’s colour. All the studies had pointed to aggressive limestone mining activities in the area.
Meghalaya has an estimated 15,100 million tonnes of limestone reserves, and large-scale mining of limestone has been on since 2005.
Lukha flows from the southern part of East Jaintia Hills district into southern Assam’s Barak Valley and ends up in the floodplains of Bangladesh.
It receives water from the rivulet Lunar and small streams from the Narpuh Reserve Forest and other hills along its course.
