Workshop with villagers / farmers from East Delhi
Date: 7 January 2009
Place: Yamuna Satyagrah Sthal
Participants:
Mahaveer Singh (Age 55, Shakarpur Village)
Pritam Singh, (Age 60, Samaspur Village)
Bhoop Singh (Age 75, Samaspur Village)
Prithvi Singh (Age 30, Patpar Village)
Shayam Veer (Age 60, Samaspur Village)
Tula Ram, (47, Patpar Village)
Rohtas Bhati (Age 43, Mandavali Village)
Hukam Singh (Age 45, Patpar Village)
Avtar Singh (Age 50, Patpar Village)
Raju (45, Shakarpur Village)
Sohan Lal (70, Patar Village)
Baljeet Singh (Age 65, Samarpur Village),
Jagwat Swarup (77, Patpar Village)
Resource Persons:
BMS Rathore
Pushp Jain
Bhim
Sudha Mohan
Manoj Misra
PURPOSE
A half day workshop was held for the following purpose:
a) Devise a feasible line of enquiry for eliciting local villagers / farmers views on the health of the river
b) Assess the level of interest shown by local people in discussing / talking about the river in general as well as in personal terms
c) Look for knowledgeable individuals from amongst the group who could be trained / groomed to act as ice – breakers (due to their experience / knowledge and interest in the subject as well as easy familiarity with local dialect and traditions) along with the investigators, vis a vis the target villages, in due course of time.
d) Assess the minimum felt need of the level of expertise, tools and equipment of the investigating team
GOAL
1. Devise a standard methodology and do’s and don’ts for the investigating team as well as to assess training needs if any for the investigating teams, before they embark on the field visits.
2. Identify appropriate leads to formulate Principles and Criteria for incorporation as part of RHI which emerge, if any, out of the consultation
MINUTES
LINE OF ENQUIRY
- Who is / are the oldest amongst the group. Can you recall the river of your childhood?
a) Of the initial eleven farmers (Baljeet Singh and Jagwat Swarup joined later) Bhup Singh ji at 78 years was the oldest amongst the group.
b) As a child (this was before Country’s independence and I was around 13-14 yr old) we used to spend almost our entire day by the river side. Early in the morning we would bring our animals (Buffaloes) for grazing by the river side and then frolic the whole day in the forests there (the river bed was fairly forested then)
- When was the river fully alive, vibrant and welcoming (potable water)
a) Till about early 1970s the river was fully alive.
By alive it means that it had flowing water round the year (Flow used to vary with season); water was crystal clear most of the time except in monsoon months; we could drink the water and bathe in the river; there were turtles and fishes galore in the river; there was only one bridge to cross the river (?);
- When did the river start to deteriorate (no longer potable, but good enough for bathing of self and cattle)
a) By 1975 the river water could no longer be consumed by humans, although one could still bathe in it.
- When did the river start to become unfit for any sort of relationship with it
a) By 1980 the river had become bad enough for us to lose direct relationship with it, although it still provided irrigation water to our fields
During this enquiry while discussion began with the older persons in the group, few others joined in with their views and understanding. (when too many started to talk about their experiences at the same time, Bhup Singh ji, the oldest in the group, stood up and took charge of the sharing of views and experience about the river)
- What ails the river today
a) There is little flow in the river other than in the monsoon months
b) River’s water has been abstracted upstream of Delhi
c) Too many drains bring sewage into the river
d) The river bed’s natural topography has been changed beyond recognition
- How do we know that the river is sick
a) The water stinks
b) There is no life (no fish, no turtles, no crabs)
c) Original channels have disappeared
d) The ground water is going deeper and deeper
- What are the factors responsible for the current state of the river
a) Water abstraction from the river upstream of Delhi
b) More and more sewage entering the river
c) Decrease in intensity and volume of annual rainfalls and frequency of floods in the river
d) Encroachment of all kinds over the river bed
- When did the physical structures like the embankment and Barrages came up in / on the river
a) It all started after independence. But most came up after 1975.
- How do we know that the water is unfit for consumption
a) Its color is black
b) It stinks
c) There is no life in the river
d) Now no one takes their buffaloes into the river
- Which were the years of the most severe floods in the river
a) The highest flood in my memory (Sri Bhup Singh) was in 1947, when there was water all over between river Yamuna and river Hindon. It was because of the floods that the bodies of dead from the riot got carried away from Delhi and hence Delhi was spared the outbreak of diseases from dead bodies on the streets.
b) Next was in 1978.
- How did you cope up during the floods
a) We used to move over to higher areas like the elevated village of Patpar (which at that time had the remnants of an old fort in which the village was located).
b) Some of us used to stay on tree tops
- Were floods beneficial
a) Yes, floods used to bring fresh silt which gave us good crops the succeeding year, despite us losing the crop for the year to flood waters.
b) Floods also removed the muck from the river bed
- What morphological changes did the river experience during the floods
a) The most notable were two channels that used to come alive with the rise in water in the river. One was in the east, where the Yamuna Pushta today stands and the other was in the west along side where the railway track today is in Nizamuddin.
- Are there milestone years which saw the change in the river
a) Yes, the period from 1975 – 1980 can be considered to be the most critical when the river saw major changes in its water flow as well as change in the river bed’s topography.
b) It was also the period when large scale colonization of lands in Jamuna paar started by the DDA
- How have your farming practices in the river bed changed over the years
a) We have shifted from traditional bullock led tilling of lands to tractors; from river irrigation to ground water irrigation through tube wells; single crop to multi cropping; Cow Dung fertiliser to Urea (inorganic fertilizer); Dawai (insecticides) from none before
b) The river bed which had been forested and undulating has been converted into almost plain terrain and farm lands wherever it was feasible.
c) More and more farmers have become share croppers.
- How has it impacted the river, if at all
a) It must have impacted the river.
b) We are told that the pollution from our fields reaches the river too
- How has the availability of ground water changed over the years
a) This is one of the most visible changes in the river since olden times.
b) Earlier under ground water was available in the khadar almost ‘hands deep’. One only needed to dig a bit and there the water was available. Now even the tube wells are going deeper and deeper.
c) Thanks, to the floods in the river this year (2008) that the tube wells are readily guzzling out water now.
- What interventions in the river / river bed / flood plain made either by the state agencies or by individual / non government agencies that they think have had a bearing on the conversion of river from a healthy river into the current sickly one
a) The ground water in the river bed has dramatically gone down since 1980 due to the digging of Ranney Wells in the river bed by the government
b) All these roads and bridges over the river have also added to the pollution.
c) More and more buildings in east Delhi and in Khadar has also impacted the river
- How would you define a healthy river
a) There is flowing water in the river round the year although the volume and speed of the flow changes from season to season (good understanding. Can they figure out monthwise expectations?)
b) Water fit for drinking purposes
c) Clear water so that a coin can be seen lying on the bed
d) A river that floods frequently
e) Sub surface water is at a level that one can access it by digging with hands
f) Natural topography of the river bed / flood plain has not been altered
g) River flows in number of channels some of them dry gradually after monsoon and revives on the onset of monsoons
h) River channels that emerge with rise in river water during floods, remain intact
i) Fishes, turtles, crabs, birds of various kinds abound (Ranges could be built in)
j) River can be used for transportation purposes
k) It does not suffer the onslaught of polluting drains (Ranges?)
- What are the practices that you think can and should be changed / reverted back to, to enable the river to revive
a) While we can not go back to the days of bullock led tilling, but we can certainly go back to more and more use of organic farming practices
b) Careful extraction of ground water from the river bed
- Any other Notable feature/s
a) Bore well water away from the river in Samaspur and Mandawali village is far more polluted than the water extracted by a bore well next to the river ! (Observations by Bhati ji).
ADVANTAGES OF STARTING WITH THIS GROUP
The resource persons have had a long standing familiarity and good will with the group in question. Resultantly the group members have good degree of confidence and good working relationship with the resource persons.
LESSONS AND LEARNINGS
1. It will be good if we can have a team comprising 2-3 persons (like Bhup Singh ji) representing ITK (Indigenous Traditional Knowledge) and some experts who complement this with science ( like the one gentleman who was on Yamuna Yatra from Environic Trust, testing water quality). May be, a team of 4-5 persons would be quite handy.
2. Help the team as above develop a tool kit ( ITK + science) , which could be validated over the identified / selected stretches of the river Yamuna.
3. The team while visiting these stretches, would not just validate the tool kit in most participatory manner, but it will as well help the people in these location/s to connect with the issue that they identify with by applying the diagnostic tool kit. The people would not only be diagnosing (and in the process help validation) the river’s health, but the diagnosis would help them to put up an action plan to address the health issue arising out of the said diagnosis. This should lead us to engagement of civil society at large and thus pave way for a larger campaign for the river and initiation of local level actions for the river’s revival, right away. (BMS).
POSSIBLE PRINCIPLES AND CRITERIA (Too early to expect these to emerge)
General comments and Suggestions:
1. It is a very good and useful exercise
2. Looks like people participated very well (adv already highlighted
3. Although “whys” of the current situation have come up here and there, it is necessary to make people analyse further the current state of affairs and group them in to different causative factors such individuals (locals), industry, Govt action and so on.
4. Idea of having a steering team is fine but with scope for involving locals at different locations: we do not want general observers and powerful people to be in the team. Such groups must have primary stakeholders and not the so called secondary stakeholders.
5. Let us test this method at another place with good orientation on the participants.
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