Pollution from the burning ghats
There are eight ghats on the riverbanks in a 10-12 km radius around the Taj Mahal. All are used for bathing, religious rituals, idol immersion and cremation. Apart from the organic waste and plastic, even carcasses are regularly found floating on the Yamuna
Thick black smoke billows out
Despite a Supreme Court order in 2015 to protect the monument from pollution damage, the UP government has failed to remove the wood-burning crematorium closest to the Taj
He’s a crowd-puller, in death as in life. For 30 long years, the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, stood at his jharokha every morning, resplendent in his court attire, acknowledging the crowd below. Nearly 352 years after his death, a crowd still scrambles for his darshan. Standing in front of the soaring mausoleum he built for his beloved empress, they jostle, shove, smile, pout, make silly faces, for that ultimate #TajMahal selfie. No matter the haze of pollution, the iron scaffolding, the stains or cracks that mar the marble edifice. Who knows if their lives will be the same when they are done? Who knows how long the Taj Mahal will survive?
“You can shut down the Taj. You can demolish it, if you like. You can also do away with it.” That stinging comment from the Supreme Court on July 11 has ignited a debate of unusual interest over preserving India’s best-loved and most-visited monument. Daily hearings will start from July 31. As the bench says, “The Taj Mahal must be protected.” On July 16, Union ministers have gone into a huddle, along with the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, to meet the threats facing the Taj. This is a moment of truth. “The time has come to open up conversations,” says A.G. Krishna Menon, architect and conservationist. The problems Taj faces are very complex, he explains, but perhaps the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Pyramids in Egypt or the Acropolis in Athens have already faced these. “Let’s explore and learn from the world, so that we can leave the monument to the next generation as we found it.”
As the medieval edifice meets modernity, new signs of danger are mounting. A raft of new research suggests that the source and type of problems, as well as their solutions, have changed dramatically over the years. For the last 35 years, india today has reported on the fight to save India’s only wonder of the world, ever since the country’s longest and perhaps the most difficult legal struggle to rescue heritage from pollution started in the Supreme Court. History rarely offers second chances. And we again take this opportunity to stand up, face facts, speak out and, hopefully, change course. It’s a moment of solidarity, not looking for blame but for solutions; of setting aside the politics and embracing the hour. Our democracy shows the collective strength of engagement, to find innovative ways and create positive changes. So can we save the Taj?
Upkeep in a Shambles
At the centre of the debate is environmentalist and lawyer M.C. Mehta, the man whose public interest litigation in the 1980s resulted in stringent orders against the Mathura oil refineries for significantly reducing ambient air quality around the Taj (M C Mehta vs Union of India,1996). Since then, the Supreme Court has directed action to clean the Taj, declaring 10,400 square kilometres of area the Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ), closing down or relocating polluting units. In a fresh application, Mehta has alleged that the upkeep of Taj is in a shambles: the colour of the marble is turning brown, cracks are appearing, minarets are showing signs of tilting, materials are falling off, chandeliers are crashing, CCTVs don’t work, drains around the area are clogged, illegal encroachments, industries and activities are mushrooming in the vicinity, while a dying Yamuna is putting the foundation of the Taj at risk and also promoting invading insects. “Pollution is still the biggest problem,” says Mehta, “but its source and nature are very different now.”
In the last one year, the story has been gathering momentum in court room four of the Supreme Court. Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta have sounded an alert on the “changing colour”, voiced their annoyance at the absence of “a vision document”, demanded “constant dialogue” with “genuine experts” and cautioned against “adversarial” grandstanding. In August 2017, they raised a careful but definitive finger at the political and bureaucratic machinery— at the Centre and Uttar Pradesh: “This is a world famous monument and you want to destroy it?” In November 2017, they brought public attention to the fragility and irreversibility of its marbled magnificence: “You can’t get the Taj again if it is destroyed.” In May this year, they subjected the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to sharp and relentless questioning: “According to you, you are looking after the Taj very well and nothing has to be done? You are not ready to accept that there is a problem?”
Fumes of Death
It was another judge of the Supreme Court who raised yet another red flag. In September 2015, when Justice Kurian Joseph visited the Taj Mahal with his family, something caught his eye: fumes of acrid black smoke coming toward the monument. It emerged from a crematorium, Mokshadham, nestled between the Taj and the Agra Fort. In a letter to the Chief Justice of India, Justice Joseph sought the intervention of the apex court: should the crematorium be shifted or should chimneys with wet scrubbers be installed to ensure zero carbon emission? But efforts to shift the cremation site have not worked (they hadn’t worked even when the Dr S. Varadarajan Committee on atmospheric environmental quality and preservation of the Taj Mahal suggested its removal in 1994). One of the four official burning ghats in Agra, it is the most popular, with up to 100 bodies burnt every day, each requiring about 300 kg of wood, informs a member of the Kshetra Bajaj Committee, a voluntary organisation that provides funeral material. The new technology is in the process of “getting installed”—for the last four years now.
A River Runs Dry
For 200 kilometres from Delhi, the river flirts with the road. At Etmadpur in Agra they criss-cross. And the romance fizzles out: the ancient river is eerily empty, a landscape of sand and silt. The five-year-old smart expressway moves on, to be closer to the action: India’s only wonder of the world: the Taj Mahal, and the giddy crush of humanity that
“LET’S EXPLORE AND LEARN FROM THE WORLD,” SAYS ARCHITECT AND CONSERVATIONIST A.G. KRISHNA MENON, “SO THAT WE CAN LEAVE THE MONUMENT TO THE NEXT GENERATION AS WE FOUND IT. THE TIME HAS COME TO OPEN UP CONVERSATIONS”
descends on it every day. The river shrugs and keeps quiet. It knows what it knows—the Taj dies if it dies. So ignore the river at your peril.
A dry, polluted Yamuna was never in Shah Jahan’s scheme of things. Sparkling blue and plentiful at its origin near the Yamunotri glaciers, it is virtually a sewer by the time it reaches Agra, says geologist Anil Kumar Misra, professor at Sikkim University in Gangtok. At the Hathni Kund barrage in Haryana, the Yamuna is robbed of 99 per cent of its water. Between Panipat and Agra, a series of drains, dark with untreated wastewater, open into the river. At Delhi, Yamuna gets the most polluted, with 17 sewage drains dumping 3,296 MLD (millions of litres per day) of sewage into the river. The City of Taj doesn’t spare the river: through its 122 kilometre journey in Agra district, about 90 drains discharge sewage into it, only 29 drains have wire meshing.
That’s not all: clusters of illegal settlements, called colonies, have mushroomed along the most ecosensitive zones on its banks, with houses, apartments, commercial buildings, farmhouses and industrial units taking over thousands of acres of its floodplains. The view of the Yamuna from the Taj is a disturbing sight: on a normal day, at any point in time, one can see truckloads of stinking garbage being dumped into the turbid, slimy, black river, with mounds of plastic bags, strips of leather, mouldy flowers and vegetation, even carcasses and cadavers floating in it.
City under Pressure
A far cry from the Agra of the Mughals, when three generations of emperors initiated an extraordinary sequence of urban development and architectural projects: forts, palaces, pavilions, gardens and serais. Even now, carved jali screens, pillared verandahs and rooftop chhatris can be seen as the underlying building idiom. Travel accounts in the 16th and 17th centuries described it ‘a magnificent city’. Not just contemporaries, research by former directorgeneral of the ASI, Debala Mitra, shows how Agra was a study in urban landscaping, built on a grand scale, with massive hydraulics for irrigation, radial road networks and monumental riverfront gardens.
Today, for tourists visiting the city, Agra is an unhappy experience: from lack of public convenience and information centres, pollution and bumpy roads, crowds of harassing hawkers, peddlers, touts, guides and photographers and an absence of nightlife. Precisely the reason why “Taj Mahal comes first and Agra second”, shows a survey by researchers Shiv Kumar Sharma et al of the department of management, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra. To transform the city in an age of ‘experience economy’, India may have something to learn from other countries: the UK, for instance, where heritage tourism has evolved as a vital part of the economy—supporting a £20.2 billion gross value added contribution to the GDP and generating 386,000 jobs.
A Plastic Paradise
Sunday, June 3. There was a buzz in the air. “Aa raha hai (he is coming),” said Raju the rickshawallah. “A minister from Delhi,” added Nand Kishor, owner of Maa Kela Devi Dhaba, shaking debris out of a broom. “Will Yogiji (UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath) come too,” asked Ahmed, a courier agent, waiting for his first kulhar of tea. As the day wore on, the news spread: Dr Mahesh Sharma, Union minister of state for
“NEW STUDIES SHOW THAT POLLUTION IS STILL THE BIGGEST PROBLEM, AFFECTING THE TAJ,” SAYS ACTIVIST M.C. MEHTA. “BUT THE SOURCE AND NATURE OF THE POLLUTANTS ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE 1980s”