The Hindu Devotees performing
rituals at the bank of river Yamuna during Chhat festival, in Allahabad
recently. Photo: Brijesh Jaiswal
Special Arrangement Yamuna
Basin
TOPICS
A look at what ails the Yamuna
Popularly called the AQFM case, it is since 1994 that a public
interest litigation (PIL) is under adjudication at the Supreme Court of India.
Standing for ‘And Quiet Flows the Maili’ Yamuna, it is the title of a news item
that had appeared in a national daily and was suo moto picked up and converted
into a PIL by the Hon’ble Supreme Court.
The fact that the highest court in the land continues to
adjudicate the case even after nearly two decades indicates that little if
anything has improved with regard to the sad state of the river in the city. On
the contrary, a recent affidavit filed by the Central Pollution Control Board
(CPCB) in the case, based on Court mandated field investigations carried out
during the month of March 2012 informs that the length of the severely polluted
stretch of the river has actually increased by a whopping 100 km. This is when
the State by its own admission has already spent more than Rs 4000 crores on
it. Clearly something somewhere is seriously amiss. But what and where is the
question.
Allow an analogy. A person prevented from drinking water develops
a result serious stomach ailment. On his approaching a doctor, the
latter starts to treat just the stomach ailment ignoring the causes resulting
in dehydration, which is responsible for the ailment in the first place. It
being a classic case of poor diagnosis followed by misplaced treatment, the
results remain disappointing and life threatening.
The story of the Yamuna is unfortunately no different. The root
cause of the river’s problems lay some 200 km upstream of the city of Delhi, at
a place called Hathnikund, which on the river’s basin map is actually like a
chicken neck (throat of the river) and where a barrage on the river has over
the decades slowly but surely diverted the river’s entire water into two
canals, choking it to almost death for the non-monsoon nine months. So much so,
that not a drop of original river water is to be found in the river in the city
or downstream.
Most surprisingly all the good ‘doctors’ in the matter, be itthe state executive, the judiciary, media or
even the civil society, havecontinued to focus on the river’s ‘stomach
ailment’, which is the rising pollution levels in the 22 km river stretch in
the city, unmindful of the tightening ‘water’ squeeze around the chicken neck
of the river at the Hathnikund barrage. And the result is there for everybody
to see.
The recent report,
released on November 9 by a two member committee set up by the Supreme Court,
comparing the state of the Yamuna River in Delhi to a sewage drain is realistic
to that extent. But what remains a matter of surprise is the fact that our
‘experts’ continue to treat the river as alive till Wazirabad barrage in Delhi,
whereas the river has been dead for almost a decade now at the Hathnikund barrage,
much upstream of the city of Delhi.
So, is there anything
that can be done to remedy the situation?
The answer lies in
renegotiation of the water sharing agreement signed between the riparian
states. An MOU on river Yamuna’s water sharing dated May 1994 was drafted and
signed with little transparency or public debate by the chief ministers of the
river’s riparian States (Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and
Rajasthan) in the presence of the then Union Minister of Water Resources left nothing
except flood waters for the river, which we believe is at the root of the
problems currently faced by the river. And unless this is recognised and the
agreement is renegotiated in a participatory manner, the money spent on the
river Yamuna will continue to go to waste without yielding any positive
results.
Additionally, there is
and never was any place for pollutants, both solid and liquid, to find their
way into the river, as they do today. It is all happening in a brazen violation
of the law of the land, namely the Water Act of 1974. That the present
pollution abatement mechanism in place in form of the Central and State
Pollution Control Boards (CPCBs and SPCBs) are not institutionally up to the
task had been realised by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, MOEF and
some ameliorative steps had been initiated during the tenure of a former union
minister of environment. Those steps are needed to be taken to their logical
fruition with a sense of urgency that ensures that waste water is treated, recycled
and reused for non-potable uses and not permitted under any circumstance to
find its way back to the river.
The strengthened
pollution control institution then needs to adopt a ‘healthy rivers’ thumb rule
of 40:60 for permitting maximum water diversion from perennial rivers in the
country with the diverted water (not exceeding 40 per cent of flow at any time)
not allowed to find its way back to the river in any form. Here perhaps lies
the magic wand that all the rivers in the land are desperately seeking.
(The writer is the
Convener of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan.)
