A RIVER GROANS UNDER NEGLECT

Successive governments have spent thousands of crores on cleaning the Yamuna, but the river's condition continues to deteriorate. Ifrah Mufti tries to analyse why a clean Yamuna remains a distant dream.

- Ifrah Mufti

REMEMBER former Delhi water minister Satyender Jain advancing the Yamuna River cleaning deadline to 2023 from 2025 followed by the former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pushing it again to 2025? Recently, Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena further extended it to 2026.

According to environmental activists, there is no dearth of funds but the only thing missing is the will to clean the river.

The central government has already granted over 8,500 crore to the Delhi government for this mission. This is in addition to several thousand crores that has already been spent on the ailing river.

According to the reply to an RTI application filed by Delhi-based environment activist Amit Gupta, Delhi Jal Board (DJB) received over ₹1,200 crore under the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) for Yamuna Action Plan III between 2018 and 2023. Despite all this, the dream to see Yamuna clean is still a distant one.

As no work with visible effect has been done, the experts believe that the time has come to take a few urgent steps.

Suggesting simple solutions, river scientist Faiyaz Khudsar, who is also the scientist-in-charge at Yamuna Biodiversity Park, said wetlands need to be identified on the Yamuna floodplain and they need to be restored in a way that they have substantial water. "It (wetland) acts as a nursery of water.