New Delhi's filth continues to choke once-sacred Yamuna River

NEW DELHI -- With his blue-gloved hands, Rizwan Ali lowered the forked dredging tool slowly into the foul-smelling river and pulled out rotting marigold garlands, shoes, plastic bags, decaying fabric, gooey industrial waste and broken bangles.

"This is the first time I have come to the river. It is black and full of filth. There are no fish. Is it a river or a drain?" Ali said, before turning to teach a group of children how to clean the Yamuna River, as part of a volunteer drive to revive New Delhi's lifeline. "Because of our lifestyle and neglect, the river is breathing its last breath."

The relationship between the holy Yamuna River, said to be a manifestation of a Hindu goddess, and the Indian capital is a complex one. Most residents are aware of its plight but rarely visit the riverbank, except to make Hindu religious offerings during festivals and funerals. The city gets 70 percent of its drinking water from the Yamuna, even though the river has become a drain for the city's filth.

Environmentalists say that daily dumping of untreated sewage and industrial waste and the development along the river's fragile flood plains have choked it, thinning its flow.

"We have killed the Yamuna River and turned New Delhi into a heat sink. The river reflects the true character of our capital -- its flawed planning, unsustainable lifestyle and corruption. It is the dirty underbelly of the city," said Manoj Kumar Misra, coordinator for the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan, a coalition of more than 10 citizen groups fighting to bring the river back in people's consciousness.

The story of the Yamuna River is not unique. Almost all of India's major rivers have suffered because of population growth, development, industrial and urban waste, as well as religious rituals in which residents toss flowers, fruits and coconuts into the water.

Fourteen years ago, India set up the National River Conservation Plan to protect 38 ailing rivers, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the rivers back to life. Officials have built sewage treatment plants, modern toilets and electric crematoria so that Hindus have an alternative to dispose of their dead.

Despite these interventions, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, told Parliament over the summer that rivers such as the Ganges and the Yamuna are "no cleaner than 20 years ago."

The 13-mile stretch of Yamuna that runs through the capital is the dirtiest of any river in India, unable to sustain aquatic life and unfit even for animals to bathe in. After descending from the Himalayas, the Yamuna flows through five states. But it is reduced to a dirty trickle in New Delhi, in part because of heavy usage by factories and farms upstream.

Pollution by the capital's burgeoning population exacerbates the problem.

"Every year, New Delhi adds half a million more people. And 60 percent of the people live in neighborhoods without any sewage treatment facility. All the urban waste goes into the river," said Tejendra Khanna, the lieutenant governor of Delhi and chairman of the two-year-old Yamuna River Development Authority.

New Delhi dumps 870 million gallons of sewage into the river daily, of which only 200 million gallons are treated. In the next five years, Khanna plans to lay 189 interceptor sewers and connect them to treatment plants.