Revitalising the riverfront

Imaginative redesigning can make a river the focus of a city's identity, as Ahmedabad is seeking to show with the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. Will other Indian cities pay attention?

Indian cities are not very kind to the rivers that flow through their midst. Look at the Yamuna in Delhi or the Ganga in Kolkata. Choked with weeds and floating rubbish, dark with the effluence from industries and domestic sewer that flows into them, it is as if urban India has turned its back on the very rivers that gave them life.

Ironically, imaginative redesigning can make these rivers the focus of the city's identity and improve the environment and quality of life of its citizens, as London, Paris and numerous other cities have shown.

Ahmedabad is seeking to replicate just such an experience with urban re-engineering with the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project.

Until around five years ago, the Sabarmati as it flows through the city of Ahmedabad was nothing more than a nullah.

Like a lot of Indian rivers, it was a shrivelled-up strip of water for most of the year; its dry river-bed the site of numerous bustees, and the occasional public event "" a visiting circus and the city's famed international kite-flying festival.

But in the few short months of the monsoon, it swelled up and flooded low-lying areas, causing much destruction to life and property.

And then the linkage with the Narmada Canal happened around five years ago, and the Sabarmati changed forever. There was water all the year round, given that the Vasna Barrage a few kilometres downstream helped to regulate the amount of water in the stretch of the Sabarmati along the city.

Very importantly for a city which draws as much as 42 per cent of its water from the ground, the enhanced water in the Sabarmati meant that groundwater tables in a range of 8-9 km from the city rose dramatically.

The release of the Narmada waters into the Sabarmati also made possible the plans to revitalise the Ahmedabad riverfront, which had been in the works since the early 1960s when Bernard Kohn, a French-American architect-planner, first came up with a proposal.

Governments, of course, move very slowly and it was only in the 1980s and the 1990s that the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation stirred itself to submit plans and commission feasibility studies under various Union government schemes "" the Ganga Action Plan, the National River Action Plan and so on.

In 1997 the AMC formed a special purpose vehicle, the Sabarmati River Front Development Corporation Limited, with a seed capital of Rs 1 crore to design and execute the project.

Even so, it was only in January 2005 that the actual construction work on the project got underway.

Fairly ambitious in its ambit, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project provides for the construction of embankments along both banks of the river along the approximately 10-kilometre stretch from Subhash Bridge to Vasna Barrage.

Besides there's reclamation of approximately 175 hectares of land, which will be used to extend the existing Tilak Baug and Bhikhabai Jivabha Park as also seven new public gardens, says architect Bimal Patel, honorary managing director of the Environment Planning Collaborative, a not-for-profit urban planning and urban development management consulting firm that was chosen by the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project to come up with a comprehensive plan for the project.

A bus terminal, schools, a fire station, informal markets besides some residential and commercial developments are also planned on the reclaimed land. Besides, around 20 per cent of the land is to be sold for commercial use.

Other features of the project include developing an 11-25-metre-wide lighted promenade all along the banks with parking facilities; providing adequate, serviced land for the 10,000 or so households who now live on the riverbanks and will be affected by the project; developing a four-lane road on both banks; laying down sewer lines and storm water drains, along with pumping stations along them.

There are also plans to augment the sewage treatment at Vasna and add two more. Another bridge between Vadaj and Doodheshwar, to add to the five now that connect the two banks of the city, is also coming up and will be opened to the public sometime next year.

"Much of the work on the diaphragm wall and the anchor slabs has been completed," says Dilip Mahajan, deputy municipal commissioner and executive director of the project.

"Work on the retaining walls will start next, and be completed by March 2008. With this, the first level land reclamation is done. The second level reclamation has also started two months ago. Ghats have been constructed in 21 places. The tenders for laying sewer lines have been prepared and will be issued in a week's time."

According to Mahajan, the total project cost, as per estimates drawn up in 2004, will be Rs 1,400 crore. A self-financing project, the proceeds of the sale of commercial and residential land was meant to foot part of the bill, but around half of the total project cost will be needed to finance the public-works part of it.

"But the Rs 550 crore loan we have raised from HUDCO should see us through," Mahajan adds.

Clearly, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project is well on its way to completion and, hopefully, success. Perhaps it is time Delhi and Kolkata took a leaf out of its book.