Nanomaterials in Sewage Treatment for Cleaning River Yamuna from the Lenses of the Responsible Innovation

Abstract

World over rivers, particularly in and around urban canters are facing severe threat of the ‘pollution’. Though the river pollutions are highly specific to the cultural setting of the city, still driven by the technological fixes, at policy level, unrestrained faith is reposed in the capabilities of the technology. Such ‘black boxing’ of the technology marginalizes the innovative potential to address the environmental issues faced by the society. Interaction between the society and technology is nuanced phenomenon. Without due consideration of the ‘risk & safety’ and ‘values’, the responsible nature of both, technology as well as innovative process, comes under question mark. To study these nuanced and complicated interactions, this paper has selected river Yamuna in National Capital Region (NCR) of India as case study. After Failure of earlier programs to ‘clean’ the Yamuna in Delhi, Nanotechnology has been propagated at the policy level with certain claims regarding the potential of the nanotechnology. Objective of this study was to analyse the ‘true potential’ of nanotechnology to clean the river Yamuna in NCR. This paper has been divided into four parts. The first part is about the background of the case study which would reflect on the convergence of various problems associated with the river pollution in general and Yamuna in particular. The second part has discussed the adopted framework of the ‘Responsible Innovation’ and a need to broaden and implement the framework in case studies. The third part is focused on the method of the data collection and procedures adopted. Finally, the findings and conclusions on case study are discussed in fourth part.