Role rivers play in our survival!

Rivers have been flowing even before human beings first came to existence. In fact, most of the civilisations prospered by the sides of rivers.

The landscape connected with rivers is very historic, yet we don’t recognise it as natural heritage, the way we treat historic monuments as heritage sites.

River Ganga is very old, and so are its many tributaries. Uttar Pradesh is blessed as many historic and mighty rivers flow through its vast landscape.

Every year, Yamuna, Ramganga, Sharda, Gomti, Saryu and many smaller rivers restore the catchments with fresh water, replenish groundwater and support innumerable life-forms.

India currently has 26 sites designated as Wetlands of international importance (Ramsar Sites), with an area of 6,89,131 hectares.

In Uttar Pradesh, Upper Ganga river, ranging from Brijghat to Narora has been declared as Ramsar site. In the Gomti river basin alone, there are more than two thousand water bodies, mainly ponds and wetlands, connecting with the river corridors. As many as 11 rivers flow through the district of Pilibhit alone.

There are several wetlands around Lucknow, but most of them are victim of encroachments and neglect. More than 200 water bodies have disappeared from Lucknow in the process of urbanisation after Independence.

Several smart cities are coming up with better economic opportunities. New infrastructures are being added up in the urban fabric.

What is missing in the grand urban transition is – our sensitivity towards water bodies or a culture of protecting water bodies.

Numerous smaller rivers, wetlands, ponds and lakes are on nobody’s radar.

Water management is quite fragmented with top-down planning that lacks whole ecosystem understanding.

Most of the departments working on water systems have inherent problems and have fixed mandate, emerging problems are not discussed in the organisational food chain.

Most of the problems are difficult to handle and sometimes problems are invisible. Right now our engineers are busy in preparing the compliance reports. The academics, civil societies and NGOs have limited space for decisionmaking. There is also a serious problem of water education in India, with scarcity of knowledge base about ecological restoration, needs of riparian communities as well as of the entire river ecosystems. There is a lack of transparency in project design and project implementation.

We have to design interventions that have deep resonance with local communities. We should all have to develop alternative system of dialogue and cooperation-using community’s language and local specific science. Economics and environment offer a lot of opportunities of learning from each other. Knowledge production in universities may not bring action quickly, as they are driven by curiosity. Urban local bodies are too busy to learn new things. Some of the NGOs work for the government as long as funding is there, some of the NGOs are affiliated to political parties and some NGOs serve the purposes of the funding agency. So there is a real dearth of genuine communities who would be champions of freshwater ecosystems.

So we have to turn knowledge into actionable items in quick time frame. For small rivers and tributaries, we should also designate and develop community conservation areas with a decentralized control and ownership. Planning system should offer adequate and appropriate space for engagements through constructive dialogue.

We have to address problems at a very local level and we need to build further collaborative programmes to address larger scale conflicts and demands of multiple actors.

What we need – a team of enlightened engineers and enlightened bureaucrats. What purpose a smart city would serve when our rivers have become dead, wetlands encroached and ponds transformed into a landfill.