Many members of the HCMC People’s Council raised suspicion over targets to contain environment pollution as presented by the municipal government, . . .

“All of the fully satisfactory results of six environmental targets in 2009 as claimed by the city government are just formalistic because in reality, many enterprises around the city are still discharging untreated wastewater into the environment,” said Vo Van Sen, a Council member.

The city government reported that 95% of environment violators were fined, 100% of industrial parks and export processing zones had built central wastewater facilities, but Sen bluntly rejected this fact.

“The city government reported very round figures, but there remains a fact that over 30 rivers and canals around the city were heavily polluted,” Sen said at a group discussion on Wednesday.

Recalling a news story on the pollution of the Saigon River four years ago, he said the situation was even worse now due to a lack of tough solutions from the city’s government and related state agencies to control the pollution.

“If we continue solving the problem of environment pollution by ‘false’ solutions, we will bear ‘real’ consequences of pollution in a near future,” he stressed.

Nguyen Thanh Tai, vice chairman of the city government, earlier in the session concluded that all the six environment targets for the city in 2009 are attainted.

Given good results achieved in 2009, Tai said, the city will set eight environmental targets for 2010, including 96% of people in outskirts to have fresh water, 100% of harmful solid waste to be colleted and treated, 90% of wastewater to be treated, 100% of environment violators to be punished, all some other targets.

Le Nguyen Minh Quang, another member of the council, said the achieved environmental results given by the city government were untrustworthy.

“The People’s Committee said 91.5% of people in the outskirts in 2009 have fresh water, but there was no agency to check this result,” Quang said, adding that a lot of people in the outskirts are still lacking tap water.

During the first two days of the four-day meeting, many Council members have been raising their concerns about worsening pollution of water in canals and rivers and air pollution.

Recent monitoring results given by the HCMC Environment Protection Agency showed that the city people’s livelihood has been threatened by alarming pollution of the air when 82% of monitored results were beyond the standards. Meanwhile, organic and Coliform concentrations in the canal of Tan Hoa – Lo Gom, Tau Hu – Ben Nghe, Nhieu Loc – Thi Nghe and others were also many times higher than the permissible levels.

Talking to the Daily on Wednesday on the sidelines of the second session of the council’s meeting, the city’s vice chairman Nguyen Thanh Tai reassured that the quality of economic growth must go hand in hand with the environment quality, so the city will reject any project that might harm the environment.

VietNamNet/SGT