Last night I dreamt of Kalindi…
Last night I dreamt of Kalindi…
Kalindi, daughter of Shri Surya Dev and twin-sister of Yama who descends on this punya bhoomi at Kalind Shikhar, high up in the Garhwal Himalayas.
But this was a sad dream…
It was a dream of parched fields, dry and arid lands with barely a glimpse of Kalindi – the river Yamuna.
This favourite haunt of Bhagwaan Shri Krishna, that nourishes Braj Bhoomi and carries countless sacred stories in its fold, is choking up.
Image Courtesy: Gangajal.org
In some places – like Baghpat in western UP – she has simply disappeared:
In fact, people of western UP have not seen their sacred river Yamuna since past seven months. Over hundred kms stretch of the river, between Delhi to Saharanpur, has completely dried up. There is no trace of water even trickling…even in mainstream.
Upto miles and miles, entire riverbed is nothing but an expansion of sand.
Not only is she drying up and choking, her playful, meandering waters are in danger of turning poisonous…
Yamuna’s waters nourish more than 60million people. It quenches 70% of Delhi’s thirst…and yet, it leaves Delhi “..as a sewer, laden with the city’s biological and chemical wastes.” It gets worse:
Yamuna enters Delhi at Palla village 15 km upstream of Wazirabad barrage, which acts as a reservoir for Delhi. Delhi generates 1,900 million litre per day (mld) of sewage, against an installed wastewater treatment capacity of 1,270 mld. Thus, 630 mld of untreated and a significant amount of partially treated sewage enter the river every day.
The Wazirabad barrage lets out very little water into the river. In summer months especially, the only flow downstream of Wazirabad is of industrial and sewage effluents. Lesser discharge means lesser river flow and thus, greater levels of pollution.
From the Okhla barrage, which is the exit point for the river in Delhi, the Agra canal branches out from Yamuna. During the dry months, almost no water is released from this barrage to downstream Yamuna. Instead, discharges from the Shahadara drain join the river downstream of the barrage, bringing effluents from east Delhi and Noida into the river. This is the second largest polluter of the river after the Najafgarh drain.
The dream is turning out to be a nightmare in reality…
Please take a few minutes from your busy schedule today and make your family and friends aware of this reality…Let us take a pledge to treat our rivers (and all other natural resuorces) with care and kindness…Let us take a pledge to make at least one person aware of this today…Let us take the first step to reclaiming our resources. Let us make this punya bhoomi “sujalam, suphalam..” once again.
Related Post: Nightmare at Noon* – What if I had no water to drink?
P.S. Those of you on a good broadband connection, please see some breathtaking pictures of the river Yamuna here.
We can’t pollute her and treat her so badly and not see a consequence. This is awful. I’ll be making my friends aware of this.
Jai
Thank you very much for bringing out this issue. If Yamuna is a boon to Delhi, Delhi seems like a bane to Yamuna.
Such a condition of the much revered and worshipped Yamuna is difficult to see. I am going to visit Vrindavan in September during Janmashtami and I’ll make sure that I along with other devotees pray and sing kirtan for Yamuna on its banks. I shall also spread this blog with my friends on the plight of Yamuna.
There has also been a great agitation in Vraj over the ongoing construction of a bridge over Yamuna as a project for development of Vrindavan. But honestly telling you, Vrindavan doesn’t need infrastructural development.It is a place where people can come and see what Krishna’s place would have been like. It should be developed in that direction. It is a holy place and there are various forests where Krishna performed his pastimes (called vanas, like Mahavan, Bhandirvan, Bilvavan and so on). We must work to maintain those forests. We must work to make the yamuna water sparkling clean.
Instead In the materialistic effort of development, they are destroying the ecology of Vrindavan. Its a place of vedic hymns and kirtans, not of horns and sirens. Please spare Vrindavan and Yamuna.
I am sorry to divert the topic to Vrindavan from Yamuna. But its worth mentioning here that Vrindavan and Yamuna are non-different because both are shelter for devotees. We must work to save the Vedic heritage.
I was traveling from Delhi to Ramnagar last December and our train was crossing a swamp with black water in it and I asked a fellow passenger, which nalla is this? His answer, “Ye nala nahi hai ye Yamuna hai”. I couldn’t say anything I just kept looking out of the window at what was mighty river Yamuna once..
Very very sad indeed, that’s the fate of many of our revered and holy places, thanks to our secular government! I was watching a program on a telugu channel on Musi river in Hyderabad and the nutritional value of green leafy veggies grown on its banks..the program said that we would suffer from various diseases if we eat those veggies rather than benefit from them as their lead content and mercury content are phenomenally high.
I will forward the blog content to my friends in Delhi and make them aware!
Bharat, dry of not just water but concern of it’s citizens, is shining under the merciless Sun of the summer. The soft wet soil of banks in Yamuna river are drying up and dry soil of Gujarat contains the best ground water reservoir in India. What a pity !!!
True Sid & others!!
The real shame is lack of tears in our eyes………. than water in our holy rivers.
@ Jai, Madhusudan, Anupam, Uma, Sid and Ramaswamy: Thank you for your comments.
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@Jai: Thanks. Pl do make friends and others aware of this sad state of affairs.
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@Madhusudan: Delhi indeed “…seems like a bane to Yamuna”. Pl do not say sorry for bringing in Vrindavan in this discussion..It is being as much affected by this as the river itself. Thank you for your efforts..
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@Anupam: Shocking but after doing the b’ground reseaerch for this post, I’m not surprised. Sad nevertheless.
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@Uma: Thanks…Yes, rivers are now becoming a source of disease rather than nourishment 🙁
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@Sid: The soft wet soil of banks in Yamuna river are drying up and dry soil of Gujarat contains the best ground water reservoir in India True…what an irony.
Courtesy India Today:
The beauty of the Taj Mahal is no longer reflected in the Yamuna River flowing by it, whose sparkling blue waters held a mirror to the Monument to Love for centuries.
Today, the river is nearly dry and filled with sewage, threatening the foundation of the mausoleum in white marble in Agra. A recent Rs 222.21-crore effort to revive the river has largely been a failure.
Conservationists fear a dry Yamuna would weaken the wood-based foundation of the Taj Mahal, which requires moisture.
…BJP’s Agra MP Ram Shankar said a dry Yamuna was a threat to the Taj Mahal.
“Several studies have been carried out on this. There are shafts of wood holding together the foundation of the monument. This wood needs to be moistened by the river’s waters to lend strength to the foundation. But the water table below the structure is depleting because of a dry Yamuna,” he said.
There are references to ebony shafts that hold together the Taj Mahal’s stone and mortar foundation in various books on the historical monument.
Very saddening extract from How India’s Success Is Killing Its Holy River By Jyoti Thottam in Pipola:
…From the Tehri Dam, the Upper Ganga Canal channels clean drinking water 121 miles (194 km) downstream to the nation’s capital. Thanks to this bounty and supplies from its own river, the Yamuna, Delhi enjoys a water availability of 66 gal. (250 L) per person per day — comparable to the amount consumed in much of Europe. As Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and the Environment, puts it, “Delhi is a pampered city.”
Very few of the city’s residents experience that abundance. Delhi loses about half the water it gets to leakage, from both decaying pipes and theft, and what’s left isn’t evenly distributed. The privileged parts of central Delhi get as much as 132 gal. (500 L) of water per capita per day; others get only 8 gal. (30 L). And so in Delhi, as in Tehri, the poor line up at municipal water tankers and hand pumps. The Sonia Vihar pumping station, which opened in 2006, was meant to ease chronic water shortages by using supplies from the Tehri Dam. But there isn’t enough water in the reservoir, and Sonia Vihar has been operating below its expected capacity of 140 million gal. (530 million L) per day for the past two years.
Delhi’s water inequity is one of the many widening gaps between rich and poor in this booming city. Another is sanitation. The city’s population has exploded by 60% since 1995, but Delhi has failed to invest in underground sewer lines to keep pace. More than 6 million people remain unconnected to any sewer line (mainly because they live in unauthorized housing settlements), and their wastewater flows into open drains. When the Yamuna River leaves Delhi, it is unable to support any but the smallest aquatic life.
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In the 19th century, Kanpur was as important as Delhi. It was a huge garrison town for the British army and then grew into a major producer of leather goods. Kanpur’s 400 tanneries still make up its largest industry. The population has grown by 60% since 1990, to more than 3.2 million, making it the biggest city between Delhi and Kolkata.
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But unlike the capital, Kanpur does not have clean drinking water delivered from upstream. Instead, two additional canals along the Ganges divert water to farmers in the powerful rural areas, so by the time the river reaches Kanpur, it is already depleted. As a result, Kanpur has the most widespread water poverty of any major Indian city: a third of its residents get by on less than 13 gal. (50 L) per day.
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By the time the Ganges reaches Varanasi, India’s holiest city, the river has been somewhat restored by several tributaries. This influx helps dilute the impact of pollution, and there is enough water to carry boatloads of Hindu pilgrims who come to offer prayers in this temple town of 1.3 million. Even so, water levels have fallen steeply: the Ganges once had an average depth of about 197 ft. (60 m) around Varanasi, but in some places it is now only 33 ft. (10 m). Upstream there are stretches where the Ganges has disappeared completely.
From Rs 1,800 crore spent, why is Yamuna still dirty, SC asks Centre, states, R Sedhuraman, Legal Correspondent
New Delhi, October 10
The Supreme Court today took the Centre, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi to task for the worsening water quality of the Yamuna despite the fact that over Rs 1,800 crore had been spent on combating pollution so far
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The Bench noted that Rs 1,062 crore had been spent by the Centre alone, followed by Rs 219 crore by Uttar Pradesh and over Rs 200 crore by Haryana. Besides this, various corporations and civic bodies of the Centre and the states had also pitched in with considerable effort, taking the total expenditure to Rs 1,800 crore.
But the report filed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) showed that the level of pollution had considerably gone up all along the course of the river since March this year. For instance, the coliform content was measured at 17 billion per 100 ml at Delhi and Agra, against the permissible limit of 5,000, the court pointed out.
Even at Hathnikund, located upstream, coliform presence had gone up from 2,000 in March 2012 to 20,000 in August 2012. At Panipat, it was measured at 13,000 in March and at 3.8 lakh in August. The numbers for Sonepat stood at 8,000 and 20,000.
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Pointing out that the SC was seized of the issue since 1994, the Bench said it wanted to ensure that some concrete results were produced without any further delay.
From Indian holy river more toxic than ever despite £600m make-over By Dean Nelson, New Delhi, 24 Feb 2014:
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Its black, foaming water has been compared to the Thames during the Great Stink of 1858 and has long been an embarrassment to the Indian government.
More than £600 million has been spent on sewage treatment plants, toilets, waste pipes and plans have been drawn up to transform it from a large latrine into an urban parkland with waterside paths and playgrounds.
But according to the Indian parliament’s Standing Committee on Urban Development, despite the money spent on saving the Yamuna, the river is more toxic than ever.
“[The] Yamuna is dirtier than ever even after a huge amount of Rupees … 6,500 crore (£620 million) has already been spent to clean the river,†MPs said in a review of schemes to save the river. “The Committee came to know that more than 1,500 crore (£145 million) has been spent on cleaning the Yamuna river in the last two decades under the Yamuna Action Plan … By now, the Yamuna’s water – polluted and black – should have been cleaner. However, that has not happened,†their report added.
Placing this link here for the record: Cleaning the Ganga, step by step by BHARAT SHARMA, June 12, 2014