One pitfall of getting older is that often when I reminisce about my childhood to the younger generation, they reach the conclusion that I must have been young roughly about the same time as Methuselah. Last week, for instance, we found ourselves on Okhla Barrage, stuck behind a long line of cars. “We used to come here for picnics when I was your age,” I said to my kids, “kids your age used to dive in the river to pick up coins that people threw in…” My 12-year-old was aghast. “Did they come out alive?” I looked at the waves of toxic white-foam over the water and realised that my son had never seen the Yamuna clean. To him, Yamuna was that inconvenient river that sent up putrid odours across the DND flyway that even the car air-conditioning couldn’t keep at bay. “It stinks worse than a sewer,” he said, “how could those kids dive into it and come out alive?”
The way the river was now, I mused, they probably wouldn’t. For the 22-mile stretch of the Yamuna as it passes through the capital contains raw sewage from over 20 million people, chemical wastes from 20,000 large and small industries, domestic garbage, plastic, religious waste and more. What makes it even more toxic is that before it enters Delhi, the Wazirabad barrage impounds most of the relatively fresh water it has. Consequently, what flows through the city is mostly sewage and waste. Time and again, environmentalists have brought up the necessity of letting at least some water flow on from Wazirabad to dilute the pollutants in the river, but water sharing is a thorny issue. Every drop of water released goes down Delhi’s parched throat, and there’s only filth left to flow down the Yamuna.
We stared at the stinking, reeking river for a while. “Do you mean to say that when you were young, the Yamuna was actually clean enough to swim in?” my kids asked incredulously. They couldn’t drag their eyes away from the foam frothing the water so thickly. Feeling like I belonged to the Jurassic era, I nodded in assent. I even remembered boat rides on the Okhla Barrage, back in the good old days when you could actually see water instead of foam. Just then, I saw a man dragging a boat up the banks of the barrage.
“Did you go out into the water?” I asked, wondering if the river had anything left in it. He nodded. We asked him what he’d seen. The man shrugged: “Nothing much. The river is completely dead. The few fish left in it aren’t worth catching and definitely not worth eating…” The boat had belonged to his late father. “I just take it out once a while, it’s a pity to not use it at all,” he said. His father used to fish in the river when he was young. “But after we were born, he stopped fishing, for he said that the water was getting too dirty to breed healthy fish…” he said.
How did he think we could make the river healthy again, I asked. He shrugged ruefully, “no one can bring the dead to life… but there’s one thing. The river has become almost invisible except to people like me, forced to live on its banks. I think if more educated people like you saw the Yamuna in this pitiable condition everyday, they may be moved enough to do something about it!” I thought about how people like me had mutely allowed the construction of the Akshardham temple, Commonwealth Games Village and the metro line on Yamuna’s precious floodplains — and mused that his optimism was probably misplaced.