“Nadiyon se lagaav aisa hai jaise maa se mohabbat (The attachment to rivers is similar to the love one has for mother),” said Mustqeem Mallah from Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli, one of the community leaders who has been working for Manoj Kumar Misra’s ‘Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan’ as he attended a memorial event on Tuesday for the environmentalist who died in 2023.
He joined a dozen others, including farmers, activists and villagers from across northern states, people who had once worked beside Misra, at Manav Mandir Gurukul in Delhi to mark his seventy-second birth anniversary and to formally dedicate the day as Yamuna Rivers Day. Two years after Misra’s death, the river movement he founded 15 years ago has not died down — citizen campaigners pledged to continue the cause.
“‘Jungle ka dohan kaise roka jaaye’ — how to stop the plundering of the jungle — became his lifelong obsession,” his sister, Shraddha Bakshi, 63, told The Indian Express. He served as an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer for 22 years.
Before he became one of India’s most noted Yamuna activists, Misra, born in 1954, was a young IFS officer from the 1979 batch who refused to sign off on corruption. “When he joined as district forest officer in Shivpuri near Gwalior, he faced bullying and pressure from people who wanted to exploit the forests. Even the politicians wanted everything their way. He tried to report the truth, but being a junior, his letters were ignored. So he started writing articles and keeping notes of everything he saw,” Bakshi said.
She recalled how, when Misra was studying in a military boarding school in Dhaulpur in the 1970s, their father sent him letters filled with lessons on geography, weather, and landforms. “Those letters sounded like Nehru’s letters to Indira,” she said. “These letters made him curious about nature and responsible as a citizen. He was a bookworm…He would say, ‘I am still a student, still learning.’”
Misra served in the forest department for more than two decades until taking voluntary retirement in 2001 to devote himself full-time to environmental work. During deputation, he also headed World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) India’s forest and wildlife programmes, which, his sister said, expanded his understanding of ecosystems.
“He almost visited every continent’s major rivers…”, Bakshi recalled, from Himalayan catchments to the Amazon, but the pollution and encroachment he saw along Delhi’s Yamuna finally marked a turning point. “Once he saw the pollution in Delhi, that must have made him realise that this is his aim in life. When he fought for Yamuna.. he used to explain that you don’t understand what all lives around (the river).”
In 2007, he founded the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (YJA) and around 2009, Misra, with his colleague Bhim Singh Rawat, developed the People’s River Health Index (PRHI), a framework that helped villagers assess river health through simple, visible signs such as water clarity, fish presence and the condition of the banks. “People may not understand BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) or COD (chemical oxygen demand), but they can see whether they can spot a coin in the water,” Rawat said.
It was a litigation under him that led to the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) infamous ruling on 13 January 2015 in Manoj Misra vs Union of India & Others, known as the “Maili Se Nirmal Yamuna” judgment. The order banned permanent construction on demarcated floodplains, mandated mapping of flood zones and required upgrades to sewage treatment systems across Delhi and Haryana.
At the Gurukul gathering on Tuesday, members of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan and the Yamuna Nadi Mitra Mandlis (YNMMs) adopted the Yamuna Rivers Day Declaration. The document read, “In Delhi, the large-scale infrastructure projects crisscrossing the floodplain and permanent encroachment of the Yamuna floodplain have damaged the flood carrying capacity of the river. As a result, the July 2023 and Sept. 2025 (floods).”
It adds that the collective will work toward shared objectives such as “documentation of the Yamuna river’s cultural and environmental heritage, advocating for a living, flowing and pollution-free Yamuna…and initiating restoration plans aiming at water conservation, forest protection, tree plantation, waste management and chemical-free farming.”
It noted the threats faced by rivers — deforestation and dam construction in its Himalayan stretches, over-extraction of groundwater, untreated industrial discharge in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, and widespread encroachment of floodplains. It also called for a review of large dam projects such as Lakhwar, Renuka and Kishau, the restoration of environmental flows downstream of barrages, a complete halt to mechanised riverbed mining, mapping floodplains based on 100-year flood data, and prioritising ecological restoration over cosmetic riverfront development.
Rameshwar Singh from Mathura described the Yamuna’s current condition. “For two kilometres, the stench is unbearable. In summer, there is no flow… and the river reduces to only sewage from the nallahs. Manoj ji helped us understand the severity of pollution,” he said as the group discussed the present river woes, including sand mining concerns.
The members carry with them fond memories of Mishra. “I met him in 2009,” Rawat said. “Nadi kya hai… yeh unhone hi bataya hamein. (He was the one who taught us what a river truly is.) He always nudged us to understand it in its entirety,” said Rawat.
Before he became one of India’s most noted Yamuna activists, Misra, born in 1954, was a young IFS officer from the 1979 batch who refused to sign off on corruption 
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