RIVER NEEDS SPACE TO BREATHE (Times of India 17 March 2010)

Building on the floodplains of the Yamuna deprives it of room to wax and wane with the seasons. That’s not just a problem for the river. It also means seriously disrupting the process of groundwater recharge that would otherwise happen naturally. Unfortunately, government agencies like the DDA have taken the lead in violating this space, reports Neha Lalchandani
Everyone, including every government agency, is committed to save the Yamuna. And yet, everything is being done to strangle the already gasping river. This schizoid behaviour is manifest in virtually every dealing of ours with the river. We take here just one aspect — how we are dealing with the Yamuna’s vast floodplains.
When you cross the bridge over the river and drive east towards Ghaziabad, you go past pleasing green fields. These are the floodplains that extend right along the river. When the rains are heavy during monsoons, much of the floodplains get inundated. Otherwise, it’s beautiful but also very tempting for real estate developers to grab a piece of it, build embankments, and create acres of prime property.
Guess who has done exactly that and shown the way to the real estate sector? It’s none other than the government. The DDA, for instance, helped the Akshardham Temple to come up without initial clearances, despite protests by civil society groups. A bandh was constructed to restrict the spill of the flooded river and ensure that the crores spent on the temple would not be washed away when the river flooded.
Later, using the bandh as a shield, the DDA went ahead and earmarked still more space
right behind the temple to build the Commonwealth Games Village. In other words, one act of callousness, committed perhaps in the name of faith, became the basis for another such act, which in turn could now lead to several such acts of callousness. And before we realize what’s happening, the floodplains would be gobbled up by land sharks.
Is protection of the Yamuna floodplains just a hobby horse of the ‘‘loony’’ green fringe? Is it at all necessary to have the verdant fields in the middle of the city when the space can be used up to build much-needed housing? Yes, according to experts, for the sake of the Yamuna. For the river, this is apparently a matter of life and death.
Unlike the Thames which has perennial flow, the Yamuna is a seasonal river. In summer months, it shrinks to a thin stream, but in the monsoons it can swell up into a broad, mighty river. The floodplains allows it to wax and wane; they allow the Yamuna breathing space which would taken away if both sides of the river is shored up by concrete banks as is the case with the Thames, and as has been proposed by the venerable Metro chief, E Sreedharan.
And it’s not just giving the river breathing space. The vast floodplains play a crucial role in allowing groundwater recharge. Apart from the Himalayan snow melt and rain water, rivers of the Gangetic plains, including the Yamuna, get replenished by groundwater flowing through aquifers. These moisten up the layer under the river bed — which is like a wet rolled towel — to impart it steady water flow and good health.
These aspects are being overlooked by government agencies and it would appear, wilfully. Manoj Misra of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan says that in the three years that it took to finalize the site for the Commonwealth Games Village, several studies were conducted and almost all were initially against the project on the proposed riverbed site.
‘‘However, in a remarkable flip flop, the DDA managed to get the required go-ahead by even the ministry of environment and forest (MoEF) which had initially expressed apprehension over the site. Certain other permissions, like those from the Central Ground Water Authority and the Yamuna Standing Committee, were never received. The Nagpur-based National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), which had earlier said that no construction should be permitted on the river bed, in January 2008 went against its own report to say that the bandh created for the Akshardham Temple was sufficient to prevent flooding of the area,’’ said Misra.
Later on, DDA also classified the river bed as zone ‘‘O’’ in its Master Plan 2021, the objective of which was to augment water supply, contain pollution and have eco-friendly ‘‘green’’ development. However, with respected figures like E Sreedharan asking for the river to be channelled between two embankments like the Thames, the government’s resolve has weakened.
Experts say enough damage has already been done by the government’s uninformed approach towards the floodplains, and the time has come for a zero-tolerance policy towards encroachments on it. Experts are calling for the entire floodplain to be notified so that each successive government does not have the leverage to play around with the floodplain’s land use.
FLOUTING ALL NORMS: The riverbed has been witnessing frenetic activity with Commonwealth Games Village, besides other structures, coming up there