A SOLUTION FLOWS PAST THE PROBLEM

Ahmedabad’s citizens and officials toil hard at cleaning the Sabarmati, but what plagues the river is a deep rot

- By Jumana Shah

IT'S A SEWAGE DRAIN, IT'S A GARBAGE BIN, no, it's a riverbed! The 11.5 km stretch of Sabarmati along the much-feted Riverfront in Ahmedabad has been emptied of water. How and why? The first is easily answered. The Sabarmati doesn't exactly fit the classic prototype of a flowing river, much less a perennial one. Narmada water is diverted into it from a canal 20 km upstream from the Riverfront, and a barrage holds it in at the other end—so it's functionally closer to a long lake under human control. Ergo, it can be emptied.

TONNES OF MUCK

'Why' yields a rather more intriguing answer. In what's possibly an exercise that's never been seen before in the world, an emptied river is being cleaned—manually. Good samaritans and tireless squads of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) are physically picking up filth from the riverbed. The Sabarmati Riverfront has been projected as an urban marvel, but there's one fact that never made it to tourism brochures.

• Thousands of citizens join in as Sabarmati is emptied for some vigorous manual cleaning of its riverbed