The river Yamuna and Arvind Kejriwal’s claim that Haryana was mixing poison in its waters released to Delhi has become a major election issue. Legal wrangling on the matter has started, and the Election Commission has questioned the statement. Kejriwal said it was his duty to warn the citizens of Delhi. With just five days to go before the Delhi election, it might be a moment to look at the health of the river, beyond politics.
There are three separate issues concerning the Yamuna and Delhi — drinking water, pollution and environmental flow.
First, the facts. The water coming from Haryana is the only source of drinking water in Delhi and anxieties about its potability affect citizens, particularly when accountability is opaque. The supply of drinking water becomes a crisis in Delhi every few months. The capital receives its drinking water from several key inlets that all originate in Haryana, chief among them the Wazirabad Barrage, where raw water from the Yamuna is received in Delhi. The flow at Wazirabad depends on the releases from Haryana’s Hathni Kund Barrage.
During the lean seasons, water levels often drop, leading to ammonia contamination and water shortages in Delhi. The city’s drinking water depends on these inlets. Treatment at Delhi’s Wazirabad, Chandrawal, Okhlam Haiderpur and Bawana treatment plants rests entirely on the availability of water from Haryana. When the water supply is depleted, what goes into the treatment plants becomes untreatable, leading to shutdowns, which have a cascading effect on water supply. There is frenzy over securing tankers and collecting water, and this is the only subject of conversation in affected neighbourhoods.
The solution lies in joint inspection of water released by Haryana — both in terms of quality and quantity. There is also the need for an independent monitoring system to be established, and retribution in case the water released is short of the agreed norm or contains pollutants that render it untreatable for drinking. In view of the extreme distrust between governments and the matter going to the apex court every year, it is time a more functional and transparent system is put in place.
The second issue is of pollutants, apart from ammonia. This is largely due to sewage flowing in the stormwater drains, the discharge of industrial effluent mainly from unlicensed household industries, and solid waste dumping. During the period 2018 to 2021, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) set up the Yamuna Monitoring Committee (YMC) to monitor the abatement of pollution in the river. Five reports were given to the NGT, which pinpointed the roles and responsibilities of 16 stakeholders who contribute substantially to pollution. During the life of the committee, each of the stakeholders — which included the Delhi Jal Board, Delhi Development Authority, and the governments of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh — committed to a slew of measures. These have not been undertaken.
The Najafgarh, Supplementary and Shahdara drains are significant contributors to the pollution in the Yamuna, as they carry substantial amounts of untreated sewage and industrial waste from various regions, including parts of Haryana and UP. To mitigate this, both states had committed to establishing sewage treatment plants (STPs). In Gurugram, the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority had found that approximately 80 million litres of untreated sewage was discharged daily into stormwater drains leading to the Najafgarh drain. However, as of the latest reports, Haryana too has not fully implemented its commitments.
Long before 2018, Delhi had started work on an “interceptor project” to trap and treat sewage before it is discharged into the Yamuna. Despite notable improvements, which are on record, the project has not achieved its intended outcomes and the river continues to suffer from significant pollution due to incomplete sewer connections in unauthorised colonies, operational inefficiencies in some STPs, and the continuous inflow of untreated industrial waste.
The third issue is environmental flow. The National Mission for Clean Ganga under the Ministry of Jal Shakti had asked for a report from the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) in Roorkee. The NIH study was aimed at assessing the flow of water necessary to maintain ecological balance and support essential riverine functions. The NIH concluded that the current water withdrawals upstream significantly reduce the river’s flow through Delhi, exacerbating pollution levels and harming aquatic life. It recommended regulating water releases from upstream barrages, especially during lean seasons, to maintain a minimum environmental flow.
The YMC, too, had pointed out that Delhi suffers from severely reduced flow, especially during the nine non-monsoon months, and this was leading to high contamination and ecological degradation. It recommended revisiting the 1994 water-sharing agreement between the basin states of Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and UP to ensure a more equitable distribution of water.
The studies by the YMC and NIH underscore the critical importance of maintaining adequate environmental flow in the Yamuna to ensure its ecological health and the well-being of communities that depend on it. But it is unlikely that Haryana and other states will pay heed to this unless it is mandated either by the central government after arriving at a consensus or a court of law. Given the size and complexity of the issues plaguing the Yamuna, it is time that people at the helm of affairs — politicians, bureaucrats or engineers — address major problems. The solutions are in black and white. What is missing is the will to reach a consensus and to deal with the problem in an equitable and just manner.
Unless that happens, neither promises nor manifestos have any meaning. The sooner citizens realise what is happening, the better.
The writer is former chief secretary of Delhi and was a member of the Yamuna Monitoring Committee set up by the NGT
