‘Living entity’ river considered dead
One morning in late March, Brij Khandelwal called the Agra police to report an attempted murder.
Days before, the high court in India’s Uttarakhand state had issued a landmark judgment declaring the Yamuna River – and another of India’s holiest waterways, the Ganges ‘‘living entities’’.
Khandelwal, an activist, followed the logic. ‘‘Scientifically speaking, the Yamuna is ecologically dead,’’ he says. His police report named a series of government officials he wanted charged with attempted poisoning.
‘‘If the river is dead, someone has to be responsible for killing it.’’
In the 16th century, Babur, the first Mughal emperor, described the waters of the Yamuna as ‘‘better than nectar’’. One of his successors built India’s most famous monument, the Taj Mahal, on its banks. For the first 400 kilometres of its life, starting in the lower Himalayas, the river glistens blue and teems with life. And then it reaches Delhi.
In India’s crowded capital, the entire Yamuna is siphoned off for human and industrial use, and replenished with toxic chemicals and sewage from more than 20 drains. Those who enter the water emerge caked in a dark, glutinous sludge. For vast stretches, only the most resilient bacteria survive.
The waterway that has sustained civilisation in Delhi for at least 3000 years – and the sole source of water for more than 60 million Indians today – has in the past decades become one of the dirtiest rivers on the planet.
Until the 1960s, the Yamuna was – much better quality.
‘‘We have water records which show that until the 1960s, the river was much better quality,’’ says Himanshu Thakkar, an engineer who coordinates the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a network of rights groups. ‘‘There was much greater biodiversity. Fish were still being caught.’’
What happened next mirrors a larger Indian story: one of runaway economic growth fuelled by vast, unchecked migration into cities, and the metastasising of polluting industries that have soiled many of India’s waterways and made its air the most toxic in the world.
In Delhi, 22 drains gush industrial effluent into the Yamuna, while the streams and rivulets that are supposed to feed in rainwater have long since been eroded or choked off by rubbish.
‘‘We decreased the freshwater supply, and increased the polluted water supply,’’ says Thakkar. ‘‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict what would happen.’’
The damage is most stark at Wazirabad, just inside Delhi’s borders, where the river meets a barrage and comes to a sudden halt. On the other side, a major drain dumps sewage into the riverbed each day.
Animal life cannot survive in these conditions, but human life on the riverbank is ceaseless: men and women immerse themselves in rituals, bathe, and scrub hard at clothing and sheets.
Some, like Sikander Sheikh, make their living off the pollution. The Bengali, who says he is 95, operates a tiny float on the river, lifting refuse from the surface that he sells for a few dozen rupees.
He lives on the banks of the river, in a hut he built himself, adorned with bric-a-brac fished from the water. Bouts of illness are frequent. ‘‘I’ll go to the doctor, I’ll take medicines and then I’ll get better and again, I’ll come back and work.’’
Further up the Yamuna, near the city of Agra, residents in Patti Pachgai village complain of an epidemic of bone deformities and fluoride poisoning.
A 2015 study showed that towns within 2km of the Yamuna all showed at least four times the permissible level of fluoride in the water. Officials blame the millions of litres of untreated sewage pumped into the Yamuna, which they say is seeping into groundwater.
In Mathura, another town along the river, thousands of Hindu devotees gather each year to mark the day they believe the goddess Yamuna appeared on Earth. They bathe in the river and drink from it, the ecstasy obvious on many faces. Few are dissuaded by the sight of the water.
‘‘Yes, the Yamuna is polluted, but it has the power to liberate us,’’ says one priest. ‘‘If you bathe in the Yamuna, you will not go to hell.’’
India’s supreme court heard in February that £240 million had been spent on cleaning the river since 1985.
‘‘Delhi doesn’t have a lack of money,’’ says Thakkar. ‘‘It also has the highest sewage capacity treatment in the country. Nor is there a lack of attention from either political, judicial, or media quarters.’’
The problem, he says, is that time and money are being invested in a dysfunctional system. Twenty state and federal government bodies squabble for control over different elements of the river.
A plan to clean the Ganges, spearheaded by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is similarly foundering because of a lack of effective governance.