Opinion What Manoj Mishra got right about Yamuna restoration

This state of affairs is not for the lack of creative thinking. For nearly 20 years, the Indian Forest Service officer turned scholar-activist Manoj Mishra had cautioned against the pitfalls of the cleaning the river approach. Mishra, who passed away on Sunday after a month-long battle with Covid, did not underestimate the importance of pollution abatement. But he also underlined that the river needs to have enough water and its floodplains shouldn’t be obstructed from recharging groundwater. The Yamuna, as he wrote in several places, was not just about the water body that flows through Delhi — for rejuvenating it, attention should be given to what happens upstream and care should be taken of the needs of the people who depend on it downstream.

A river has its own capacity to tackle pollution. But these are contingent on its flow, which, in turn, depends on upstream aquifers. Besides, there are seasonal variations in the amount of water. Aquatic plants also help the river assimilate pollution. The problem with the current paradigm of pollution control, as Mishra pointed out, was that it “aimed to control quality of the ‘effluent’ at the source of the pollution without really bothering about the river’s assimilative capacity”. Tackling industrial pollutants had a place in his scheme of things — after all no river has the capacity to cleanse inorganic pollutants. Mishra argued that a better approach would be one that accounts for both effluent standards and the ability of the river to tackle pollution.

The master plans of Delhi paid little attention to the relationship of the city’s people with the Yamuna. Urban planning in the country very rarely takes into account the idiosyncrasies and the geomorphology of water bodies. And, Delhi’s master plans have been no different in not assessing the changes in the assimilative capacity of the river. As Mishra would often point out, there are two Yamunas in Delhi, “one upstream of the barrage at Wazirabad that supplies drinking water and the other that’s often lamented as a sewage canal”. He pushed for setting drinking water standards in the 220-km stretch of the river from Hathnikund in Haryana to Okhla in Delhi — it’s currently only fit for bathing purposes. But he also felt that diverting water by building barrages does injustice to the river: “Lift not divert water” was his solution.

At the same time, the scholar-activist contested the Delhi Jal Board’s calculation that the city needs 220 litres of water per person per day. He talked of both supply and demand-side efficiencies. The industrial and drinking water needs of Haryana on the west of the river and UP on the east are predominantly met by groundwater. However, the Delhi Jal Board is somewhat unique in the area in getting nearly 90 per cent of its needs from surface water.

For much of its pre-colonial history, Delhi did not depend on the Yamuna for potable water. The fortress cities of the past relied on step wells, water tanks and canals. Things began to change in the late 19th century when the Delhi Water Works was built at Chandrawal and water was extracted using a row of wells along the river. Thirty years later, a pumping station was constructed at Wazirabad — it could extract nearly eight times the water compared to the Chandrawal facility. In the 1950s, Delhi took water from the river only at Wazirabad and Okhla.

Mishra wanted Delhi to look at alternate sources for its drinking water — rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharging among them. “Delhi needs to take tough calls if it wants the Yamuna flowing”, he would say.

The absence of a statutory provision to safeguard floodplains that recharge groundwater worried him. During the UPA regime, along with the late Brij Gopal, professor of environmental sciences at JNU, Mishra worked on a draft River Regulation Zone, along the lines of the Coastal Regulation. The plan was taken up in the early days of the current regime, only to be shelved.

A day after Mishra’s demise, Delhi’s Lt Governor launched the Yamuna Vatika project to “restore the ecological character of the floodplains.” Very often, such initiatives end up as nothing more than beautification projects. It would be a dishonour to the memory of Manoj Mishra if the Yamuna Vatika project too goes this way.

kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com