The Ministry of Environment and Forest has also failed to show any urgency in stopping the menace.

Teenage boys diving into unearthly swathes of white foam and colourful sari-clad women standing in the same dirty waters doing Chhat Puja have become our eternal images of river Yamuna, Delhi's only river and lifeline. But why?

Because over decades, political leaders and babus in various ministries associated with the health of our water bodies, have ignored one major cause of pollution in them: Excess phosphate in household and factory-use detergent powders and bars.

Phosphorus or phosphate -- extracted from limited mines in UP, Rajasthan and Odisha in India -- is added to laundry detergents to make hard water soft. This is necessary so that the cleansing agent can perform optimally.

However, lack of standards -- or rather their enforcement -- has ensured that manufacturers don't act scientifically, but as per "competition in the market", adding up to 40-50 per cent of phosphate in their products when current USA standards cap/limit the same at 2.2 per cent and Spain even at 0.5 per cent!

82-year-old Almitra Patel, an engineer from MIT, USA, who led the movement for India's first 'Solid Waste Management Rules, 2000', explained, "In the absence of enough Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs), all our laundry waste water drains into our nearest rivers and ponds. The excess phosphate in it acts as a nutrient for algae and plants like water hyacinth, which see an unhealthy bloom."

"These then spread rapidly, covering the whole water body surface, preventing penetration of sunlight and extracting all the oxygen from it, leaving nothing for fishes and other aquatic animals to survive on," she said.

This has happened not just in Yamuna, but practically all rivers and ponds of India including Bengaluru's infamous Bellandur Lake, which keeps frothing and catches fire often, she added.

Curiously, India has never lacked detergent phosphate 'standards'. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, formulated 'scientific parameters' for phosphate in cleansing agents back in 1968.

Strangely, these -- IS (Indian Standard) 4955, 4956, 8180 and 9458 -- talk in terms of the 'minimum' phosphate to be added and not maximum, giving a free hand to MNCs, local and small-scale manufacturers to indulge in as much lather-creating phosphate as they want to!

"Unfortunately at that time, the negative effects of phosphate were not so well understood. So over the past 25 years, a committee of scientists and industry leaders -- led by Professor RK Trivedi of the Harcourt Butler Technical University (Kanpur) -- have now revised those standards," informed UK Das, senior scientist with Chemistry Department, BIS, in an exclusive chat with Mail Today.

"The standards now not just talk in terms of maximum phosphate, but have also capped them at 2.5 to 10 per cent of the total dry weight of the detergent. They also advise manufacturers to look at safer alternatives to phosphorus like Geolite and co-enzymes or bio-enzymes," he added.

These are still at draft stage but will be finalized by the end of March 2018 hopefully, officials said. "Importantly, even this has been achieved after a lot of resistance from the detergent industry," a senior officer in BIS confided requesting anonymity

But that's still not the happy ending you would look for. Unfortunately, very few of the BIS standards (across sectors) are mandatory. They are only 'informative' or 'voluntary'. It would need a law from the Government of India to make even the new BIS standards 'legally binding' on detergent makers.

The BIS Act 1986 had no provision for any standards to be made 'inescapable' for industries. But the 2016 amendment allows BIS to "recommend the government for mandatory certification of any particular standard." However, BIS officers say they can't do it alone. Related ministries must support such a presentation by BIS to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

But the related ministry in the context -- the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) -- has also failed to show any urgency in stopping the menace. It introduced its own standards called 'Ecomark' for 14 industries, including detergents, back in 1991. It says there should be "minimum to nil" phosphate in these products; but there is neither any awareness about it, nor enforcement!

A Sudhakar, Member Secretary of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), under MoEF, told Mail Today, "We are a body only looking at effluents and emissions. We dont look at product ingredients which is a domain of departments like BIS."

"But if they decide to take the issue to say PMO, we will support them," he added, inferring that till then, it would be dirty business as usual!