Till we link their restoration to a city’s water needs and treat them as sanctuaries, no action plan on rivers will bear fruit
If we want our riverine civilisation to last, then we must save our flood plains from human encroachment and greed and link them as a solution to India’s water needs. The primary function of flood plains is to hold rivers spilling over during the monsoon and prevent destruction but it is most important to understand their role in recharging aquifers and acting as groundwater storage. This can take care of a city’s needs and must be harnessed to prove a point. Till this model is functional with demonstrable benefits, nobody can prevent our flood plains from being overrun by development. According to some estimates, flood plain revival projects can be used to water over 500 river towns in India. Besides, flood plain aquifers are believed to be the only unpolluted perennial water sources left, the water naturally filtering through sand layers of the banks. This is why one hopes that after Delhi’s rainwater harvesting ponds in the Yamuna flood plain, a similar proposal to clear the flood plains further downstream and revive the Mathura-Vrindavan ghats, gets the green nod. The proposal, now with the Centre, involves demolishing makeshift temples and structures besides removing all solid waste dumps, sewer pipes and plastic dumps exiting there. This would not only clear the river, conserve water but allow for a riverfront development and beautification of Mathura and Vrindavan under the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana. However, for all their good intent, such projects should not exist in isolation but be implemented in an integrated manner if we want to renew the Yamuna, which often gets secondary treatment with a lot of heat focussed on saving the Ganga. But it sustains key cities along its banks and could change their socio-economic fortunes and address their civic concerns. Not too long ago, Noida, in the National Capital Region had a perennial water source from its Yamuna floodplain aquifer, which provided it with good quality water for over 30 years, enough to meet its needs till the sand miners destroyed the banks and polluted water entered from other areas, terminally destroying it. Flood plains are our water sanctuaries and their maintenance needs to be done in mission mode with Day Zero becoming a possibility in most metros.
In Delhi, the integrated flood plain wetlands system at the biodiversity park next to Delhi-Noida-Direct Flyway has not only revived water tables but Delhi’s flora and fauna. It has also buffered the city’s ambient quality and temperature. With desilted basins, it has arrested flooding in neighbouring low lying areas. There are challenges to flood plain management like treating sewerage from drains before they reach the discharge channels, clearing invasive weed species like water hyacinths and alternanthera and ensuring that settlers around these areas grow sustainable crops and vegetables and not those that require more water. Once the small ponds along the Yamuna flood plains become natural water reservoirs, Delhi will certainly not complain about water shortage. Sixty per cent of the water supplied by the Delhi Jal Board comes from the Yamuna, around 34 per cent from the Ganga and the rest from groundwater. So this project is expected to directly impact volumes. Question is whether the farmers, who have been growing seasonal crops here for years and living on it, will be ready to give up their rights on payment of an annual rent as proposed or willing to change cropping patterns? But at least a beginning has been made. A river’s flood plain must be excluded from human habitation and settlement and just allowed to be as it absorbs the most water and could become the biggest underground reservoir. But as Delhi went through an infrastructural overhaul over the decades, the sustainability of the development process was compromised in the name of erecting modern monuments to the city’s pride, namely the Akshardham temple and Commonwealth Games Village that completely dried out the groundwater and allowed no space for seepage or recharge. The bells had tolled way back then for the Yamuna but their gong is being heard a tad too late. However late, this is our wake-up call.