Chasing a Dying River: The Yamuna in Delhi

blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2023/07/17/chasing-a-dying-river-the-yamuna-in-delhi/

July 17, 2023

Rivers are lifelines; in India, they are sacred, holy and

worshipped by millions. Yet, it is the people and their actions
that, over decades, is polluting these sacred rivers. Souzeina
Mushtaq and Praveen K. Chaudhry have been visiting the
Yamuna river at Ghat 24 in Delhi for several years, and discuss
some of the issues — and hopes — in this final ‘India at 75’
post.

Throughout history, rivers have been crucial to the birth of

civilisations. In the Indian subcontinent, the mighty civilisations of Mohenjo-Daro and
Harappa came up along the Indus, Sutlej, and the riverbanks of the ancient Saraswati rivers
in the north; in southern India, they developed around the Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri
rivers.

Rivers are so integral to the identity of the Indian subcontinent that even the English name of
the country derives from the river Indus, ‘India’ being the Greek and Latin term for the
country of the river Indus, which emerges in the mountain springs of Mount Kailash in
western Tibet, then flowing through Kashmir and Pakistan, empties into the Arabian Sea
near the port city of Karachi.

India has about ten perennial rivers (those that maintain their flow through the year), mainly
in the north; but most of them are now turning seasonal, with fragmented and intermittent
flows. And India is not the only place where this is happening: in the United States, some of
the most endangered rivers are the Upper Mississippi and Lower Missouri, whose combined
basins span nine states across the Midwest.

Rivers in India are classified on the basis of their sources of origin: (1) Himalayan; and (2)
Peninsular rivers. The major Himalayan rivers are the Indus, Ganga, Yamuna and
Brahmaputra; the Peninsular ones are the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri.

Rivers in India are holy for Hindus, who worship them. Prime Minister Narendra Modi
launched his election campaign in 2014 from the banks of the river Ganga in the city of
Varanasi, declaring that he had been called on by ‘Mother Ganga’ to restore the river,
considered the holiest of all rivers by millions of Hindus.

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 Photo 1:
A temple
along the
banks of
the
Yamuna
river
(across
from Ghat
24) in
Delhi,
2022 ©
Copyright

information below

Polluting the Sacred

Yet, India’s rivers remain the most polluted. The Citizen’s Fifth Report (1999) states:

India has had a multi-millennial tradition of worshipping rivers. Even though Hindu
scholars will not get tired of extolling the ecological elements of Hinduism, of which
there are many, there is, nonetheless, the disparity between the word and the deed.
Indians, including the river-worshipping Hindus, do not think twice before polluting a
river.

But this is not a recent phenomenon. In 1997, journalist Samar Halarnkar wrote about what
he called ‘the rivers of death’: ‘Once symbols of purity and life for India’s teeming millions,
India’s rivers are today foul receptacles of sewage and toxic waste. If the poisoning of our
rivers is not stopped, more disease and death seem inevitable.’

In 2018, one of India’s leading environmentalists died while protesting against the
establishment of hydroelectric projects on the Ganga and its tributaries, and illegal sand-
mining activities. Guru Das Agrawal was a former Professor of Environmental Engineering at
the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur; having studied at UC-Berkeley, he was latterly
the first Head of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) of India. In June 2018, he
started an 111-day hunger strike, hoping it would compel the Indian government to work on
its promise of cleaning up the Ganga. In his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Agrawal
wrote:

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 in the past four years, all actions undertaken by your government have not at all been
gainful to Ganga and, in her place, gains are to be seen only for the corporate sector
and several business houses.

Photo 2:
Illegal sand-
mining on
Yamuna river
(across from
Ghat 24) in
Delhi, 2022 ©
Copyright
information
below

Himanshu
Thakkar, a
river expert
and
coordinator of
the South
Asia Network
on Dams, Rivers and People, a non-profit organisation based in New Delhi, too believes that
commerce has been prioritised over conservation.

Both Agrawal and Thakkar were referring to the several projects initiated by successive
governments— including waterways, riverfront development, dredging, and interlinking of
rivers — that have adversely affected the Ganga.

Yamuna: Ghat 24

Yamuna (the twin sister of Yama, the god of death), a principal tributary of the sacred Ganga
and one of the holy rivers in India, is crying for help. Alongside the Ganga, the Yamuna is
often depicted at the entrance of Hindu sacred precincts or on sanctuary door-jambs to
ensure that the visitor is symbolically purified before entering the premises. She is portrayed
as a handsome woman carrying a blue lotus, a fly-whisk, and a water pot. Her mount is a
tortoise because many still live, or used to live, in her waters.

In late 2021, a layer of toxic foam coated parts of the Yamuna near Delhi, the capital of India,
as Hindus gathered on its banks to celebrate Chhath Puja, a festival dedicated to the Hindu
sun god Surya, when fasting women offer ‘arghya’ (a Vedic practice of offering water to the
sun in the morning) standing in knee-deep waters. The white froth, a mixture of sewage and
industrial waste, formed in sections of the Yamuna river, which flows about 855 miles (ca

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1,376 kilometres) south from the Himalayas through several Indian states. According to news
reports, the pungent foam contained high levels of ammonia and phosphates, which can
cause respiratory and skin problems. Many devotees were seen wading through the toxic
foam to bathe and pray in the river despite this deadly pollution. CNN interviewed Gunjan
Devi, who said she had no choice but to bathe in the polluted waters: ‘The water is
extremely dirty, but we don’t have many options. It is a ritual to bathe in a water body, so we
have come here to bathe.’ According to the Press Trust of India, 15 boats were deployed by
the government to remove the foam, but significant damage had already been done.

Photo 3:
Toxic
industrial
foam on
Yamuna
river
(Okhla

Barrage), 2021 © Waqar Khan; used with permission by authors.

Delhi-based environmentalist Vimlendu Jha says that the lack of political will, zero urgency in
cleaning the Yamuna, and minimal action on the ground were reasons behind the frequent
foaming in the river. In a news report in Outlook magazine in 2022, Jha was quoted as
saying: ‘Delhi empties more than 3,500 million litres of municipal sewage in the river and,
despite tall claims, over 50 per cent of the sewage is either untreated or not adequately
treated and flows directly into the Yamuna …. Lack of minimum flow in the river is another
major cause of the Yamuna’s pollution.’

Bhavreen Kandhari, another environmentalist, also felt that toxic foam-covered sections of
the river are due to the negligence and absence of real action on the ground: ‘On the
Yamuna, scores of farmhouses and industries are discharging pollutants into the river. There
are about 92 drains that open directly into Yamuna, out of which 62 are untapped.’

For decades, sections of the Yamuna have been plagued by the dumping of toxic chemicals
and untreated sewage. As a result, the river appears dark and sludgy in several parts, while
plastic waste lines its banks.

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*

Industrial waste is among India’s top sources of pollution in rivers. The discharge from
industries is directly pumped into the rivers without treatment, affecting aquatic life and
humans. Eutrophication is another factor impacting rivers in India today, often induced due
to improper agricultural practices and city sewage discharge into the rivers. It leads to
overgrowth of plants and algae in aquatic ecosystems and can render a water body unusable
for various activities, from fishing to swimming to drinking water.

The most pronounced effect of eutrophication is the creation of dense blooms of noxious,
foul-smelling phytoplankton that reduce water clarity and harm water quality. Additionally,
algal blooms limit the penetration of light, reducing growth and causing die-offs of plants in
littoral zones while lowering the success of predators that need light to pursue and catch
prey. High rates of photosynthesis are also associated with eutrophication, which can
deplete dissolved inorganic carbon and raise pH to extreme levels during the day. Elevated
pH can, in turn, ‘blind’ organisms that rely on the perception of dissolved chemical cues for
survival by impairing their chemosensory abilities. When these dense algal blooms
eventually die, microbial decomposition severely depletes dissolved oxygen, creating a ‘dead
zone’ which lacks sufficient oxygen to support most organisms.

Some social and religious practices also harm the rivers — including dumping dead bodies,
and other sacred detritus (like flowers, remainders of incense, food offerings used in
private/domestic rituals, often tied in plastic bags) in the water. In 2021, thousands of dead
bodies were found floating in the Yamuna during the country’s deadly second wave of
Coronavirus which killed more than 120,000 people. The Ganga and Yamuna rivers passed
through some of India’s worst-hit Covid-19 regions; according to news reports, fear of Covid-
19 led villagers to dump dead bodies in the river instead of cremating them.

Photo 4: Cremation pyre on the banks of the Yamuna river, Nigambodh Ghat (Ghat 24),
Delhi, 2022 © Copyright information below.

Festivals like Ganapati Puja (also known as Ganesh Chaturthi), commemorating the birth of
the Hindu god Ganesh, are among major pollutants of rivers in India, including the Yamuna.
The festival is celebrated with the installation of Ganesh’s clay idols in people’s homes, and
in community pandals (temporary cloth tents ), eventually immersing the idols in the water
bodies at the end of the festival.

In earlier years, idols were made with clay and coloured with natural colours (like turmeric)
and worshipped with natural products like coconut, yogurt, milk and water. Nowadays, they
are made mostly with a mixture of Plaster of Paris (PoP) and clay, with small iron rods and
bamboo stuffing, and decorated with different paints including varnish, water colours, etc.
When these are immersed in water, it increases pollution in water bodies.

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 The CPCB
studied the
impact of the
immersion of
Ganesh idols in
India, and
concluded that
water quality
had depleted,
acid content
had increased,
the Total
Dissolved
Solids had
increased by
100%, and oxygen levels had reduced. In addition, heavy metal particles (like iron and
copper) had risen ten-fold in the composition of the water.

In 2021, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC; the pollution controlling body of the
Delhi state government) issued guidelines to District Magistrates to ensure that idols are not
immersed in the Yamuna or any other water body in the national capital. Violations would be
punishable with a fine of ₹ 50,000 (US$605 approx.) or a jail term of up to six years. To
respect the tradition of immersing idols in water, DPCC asked urban local bodies to create
artificial ponds near residential areas for the immersion of idols.

Rivers as Humans

In 2017, a court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered that the Ganga and its
main tributary, the Yamuna, be accorded the status of living human entities, which would
mean that polluting or damaging the rivers will be legally equivalent to harming/killing a
person. The judges cited the example of the Whanganui River (revered by the indigenous
Maori people, which was declared a living entity with full legal rights by the New Zealand
government in August 2017).

Indian courts and environmentalists have been critical of three decades of government
efforts to clean up the holy rivers. The last clean-up initiative deadline was set for 2018,
which was never met.

The Yamuna Action Plan (YAP), a river restoration project, was introduced in 1993 to restore
the river. It was a bilateral project between the governments of India and Japan, where
Japan offered loan assistance to implement YAP. Subsequently, two phases (YAP II and YAP
III) were initiated in 2004 and 2008 respectively. To clean the Yamuna River, ₹1,500 crore
(US$150 million) was spent on the YAP, and a plan of ₹1,174 crore (US$11.74 billion) was

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redrawn, while ₹460 crore (US$ 4.6 billion) had been given for cleaning Yamuna under the
‘Namami Gange Programme’, an Integrated Conservation Mission approved as a Flagship
Programme by the Central Government of India. But the Yamuna has remained the same,
and in fact has got worse, according to reports.

But unfortunately, the mission to clean Ganga and Yamuna (including YAP) has failed
according to the Parliamentary Committee on Environment and Forests of the Government
of India.

Something miraculous happened to the Yamuna as the world receded inside their homes
during lockdown following the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. According to DPCC findings, the
Yamuna became 33 per cent cleaner than before. Environment Conservator Diwan Singh
said the rivers cleaned themselves due to their biological potential.

Yamuna is most polluted in areas surrounding Delhi, owing to the city’s dense population and
high levels of waste. The Delhi stretch of the Yamuna river is about 22 kms (13 miles
approx.), starting from Wazirabad Barrage to Okhla Barrage, which accounts for 2 per cent of
the river’s length that flows through the capital. Yet, this stretch alone is responsible for 76
per cent of the river’s pollution. Around 90 per cent of untreated wastewater from households
pours into the river. This wastewater comprises laundry detergents and other chemicals,
increasing the water’s phosphate content and leading to froth formation. Not only that, but
this stretch is also the primary source of 70 per cent of Delhi’s water supply, serving roughly
57 million people.

Earlier this year, a high-level committee constituted by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for
the rejuvenation of the Yamuna chalked out a six-month action plan till June 2023, with
monthly targets. The committee stressed time-bound actions on ‘right parameters’ that
include enhancement of sewage-treatment capacity in Delhi and the augmentation of
Sewage Treatment Plants, tapping of drains and treatment of sewage in 44 sub-drains,
extension of the sewage network in all 1,799 unauthorised colonies in Delhi and surrounding
areas, upgrade of 13 Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETP) for treatment, management
of industrial effluents and ensuring minimum environmental flow in the Yamuna using inter-
state coordination.

Only time will tell whether these measures will be implemented and succeed, and whether
Yamuna will revive and flow perennially again. For now, one can only hope.

The views expressed here are those of the author and not of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog,
the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please
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Photographs © Praveen K. Chaudhry (except Photo 3); no photograph may be
used/reproduced without written permission of the authors; Banner image © Praveen K.
Chaudhry, Yamuna river at Ghat 24, 2023.

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