The strategy mooted by Delhi Metro Rail Corporation chief E Sreedharan to clean and beautify the Yamuna in and around Delhi and release land from its riverbed for development and other purposes may appear sound on paper, but is not very practical. Mr Sreedharan’s plan envisages erecting retaining walls on the river banks to train its flow; constructing two large longitudinal sewers along these walls to intercept sewage and take it to a distant place to treat it before releasing it into the river; and using the river’s vast floodplain to put up parks, promenades and real estate. The commercialisation of this land could generate resources needed for building the walls and other infrastructure. This is the kind of engineering solution successfully tried out on the Thames in London, which had become a stinking mess by the mid-19th century, just as the Yamuna is today. Similar taming of rivers has been done in some of the world’s key cities situated on rivers, such as Paris, Budapest, Moscow, New York and Seoul.
However, as pointed out by environmentalists, water experts and others, the Thames model is unsuitable for the Yamuna as the nature of the two rivers and the communities that dwell around them are dissimilar. While the water flows in the Thames are almost uniform throughout the year, thanks to evenly spread rainfall in its catchment, the Yamuna is fed by erratic and unevenly distributed rainfall, the bulk of which occurs in the monsoon months of July, August and September. Seasonal floods of varying intensity are fairly common, the last major one being as recently as in 2008. The vast floodplain along the river with a deep sandy profile, as it exists today, is therefore essential to allow the flood water to spread out and flow down smoothly as well as, more importantly, to percolate down to recharge the underground water aquifer which caters to a part of the capital’s water requirement. Another key difference between the two rivers is that the Thames does not have to bear the kind of socio-religious rituals that take place routinely on the Yamuna’s banks — such as cremations and discharge of ashes into the river and immersion of idols and discarded religious material. Any bid to curb such practices would tend to be viewed an assault on religious freedom and, hence, not practicable.
It is these factors that have come in the way of the Yamuna Action Plan for cleaning the river. Putting up plants for the treatment of sewage and industrial effluents, as well as high barricades at points where people have easy access to the river, have failed to curb the flow of pollutants into the river. Rs 15,000 crore spent on this plan have gone waste, in part because of faulty planning and execution. The result is that the quality of Yamuna water has continued to deteriorate.
It is not for nothing that the Delhi High Court had decreed about a decade ago that no encroachment of the riverbed should be allowed; in fact, the Akshar Dham temple and the Commonwealth Games Village should never have been allowed to be built on the river’s floodplain. Any re-development of the riverbed should be such as to make it a habitat for trees. Of late, even the Lt Governor of Delhi has put a moratorium on new construction on the riverbed. Thus, any bid for altering the natural course of the river to recover land for other purposes has to be environment-friendly and compatible with the local climate (read rainfall pattern) and geo-culture.