Gandhinagar: River Narmada as well as Bharuch-Dahej area have been kept out of the newly-designed Kalpasar region due to "serious ecological problems" affecting the sweet water lake to be build by damming Gulf of Khambhat. Sachivalaya sources said state environment department has prepared a note, which said that the area "cannot form part of Kalpasar project" following expert environmental assessment. Officials said National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur, in its report submitted last year, had asked Gujarat government to shift the dam alignment towards north of Narmada. "This was for the first time that someone suggested the need to change the alignment from Gogha-Hansot or south of Narmada to somewhere in the north of river, prompting the state government to look for options," a senior official said. NEERI said keeping Narmada as part of Kalpasar meant a setback to the fragile ecosystem of the Narmada estuary. The state environment department reported that huge solid waste is being dumped by industries along the banks of Narmada and its tributaries at Dahej, Ankleshwar, Panoli and Jhagadia. Studies show at the mouth of Narmada estuary, near Dahej, the level of total suspended solids (TSS) is very high. The river dumps 50 million tonne of TSS annually into the Gulf. Then, 20 per cent of treated effluents are dumped in it, which would also affects Kalpasar lake. The government has not been able to solve how to resolve the environmental impact of the solid waste being dumped via Sabarmati into the Gulf. An official said, "Though Sabarmati proposes to provide less than 10 per cent of sweet water out of total requirement for Kalpasar, it discharges more solid waste than Narmada." The official said one solution is to take the whole of solid waste that Sabarmati gets by a trunk pipeline to treat it into a huge pond somewhere near Bhal region. Narmada water would affect salinity levels along the area, south of the river. This would impact flora and fauna along the coast. Hence, it was decided to build a 30-km-long canal from Narmada to divert only one portion of monsoon waters into the lake. Officials said Kalpasar would mean a loss of20,000 hectare of mangrove forests. Under the new plan, mangroves will be grown only below the new proposed dam site, south of Bhavnagar on Saurashtra coast, and south of Dahej on south Gujarat coast.