Ashish Mathew Koshi tracks the hopeful beginnings of a mass movement to save Delhi’s lifestream.
 Govind Singh, a founding member of the environmental group Delhi Greens, recently went around the city asking people one simple question: “Where are you from?” Only 30 per cent said “Delhi”. The rest said that they were from somewhere else: “South India, the North-east, Gujarat, Bihar, Orissa, but not Delhi. Even people who had lived here for 20 years would say they were from somewhere else,” Singh reported. Delhi has a severe ownership crisis unlike any other Indian metropolis, and when people don’t care about the city they live in, they’re unwilling to do much to keep it clean. This is why he’s trying to reverse the popular trend and make the city cleaner before the Commonwealth Games – beginning with the Yamuna.
The Meri Dilli, Meri Yamuna initiative was first proposed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living Foundation, when he passed the river and noticed how filthy it was. That puts an impressive amount of clout behind the campaign, which also ropes in a coalition of environmental activists, NGOs, government offices like the Ministry of Environment, the Delhi state government and the Delhi mayor, institutions such as UNESCO, student groups and residents who give a damn about the health of their city’s river. On March 7 there will be music and theatre performances, and the administering of a public pledge to clean up the river before the Games. “We need at least 50,000 people to turn up for the event,” said Govind Singh optimistically. “The number of people who turn up will determine the event’s success.” Over the subsequent week, anyone who registered – and pledged – will clean up a single ghat on each day of the week, picking up as much trash as they can. Their eventual dream is to pledge a million Delhi residents.
It's an idealistic vision, though organisers know that civic works alone will not produce a cleaner river. The Yamuna Action Plan, implemented by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi since 1993, has spent Rs 1,500 crore on its projects, but the river has only become more polluted. Just cleaning the water requires dredges, skimmers and other cleanup equipment. “Cleaning a river is a three-fold process. The three areas are the water surface, the underwater weeds and the sediments,” said Darshak Hathi, director of Vyakti Vikas Kendra, a part of the Art of Living Foundation. “Turnkey International, a company that surveys the health of rivers, produced a survey on the Yamuna and suggested specific technology that could effectively clean the river. Once this event is over, this survey will be presented to the civic authorities, along with our research from the cleanups.”
Manoj Mishra, convenor of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, feels sceptical about the initiative and its apolitical approach. “If they really want to clean up the Yamuna, they should get as many people as they can, march to Parliament, get the government to sign a resolution and guarantee regular flow for the river,” he said.
In fact only a sliver of the Yamuna actually flows through Delhi now. “80 per cent of the Yamuna’s water is diverted into Delhi at the Wazirabad dam. The remainder is left to flow and is mixed with untreated sewage from 25 sewers,” said Singh. When the river completes its 22-km stretch through the city, it is largely a stream of human and industrial waste. The chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit famously announced in February 2008 that the Yamuna would be 70 per cent cleaner by the time the Games began. Obviously this hasn’t happened. There are even rumours that the Delhi government might screen off the Yamuna so that visitors to the Games won’t have their senses offended. “How long will we shirk our responsibility to our Yamuna? Only after it is too late, it seems,” Singh said.
Despite the reasons for despair, Meri Dilli, Meri Yamuna is an exercise in optimism. By bringing together citizens and organisations, it could start to create a real constituency for the Yamuna. The river can’t be cleaned up by individual efforts. But a strong pro-river constituency could mobilise the political muscle required to actually turn things around. “This is ultimately a public awareness campaign,” said Rashmi Paliwal, head of the Art of Living centre in Delhi. “The first step is to get the people of Delhi to own up to it.”
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