Last chance to save our rivers

When was the last time you spent time with a river? Or a lake or small pond for that matter.

When was the last time you spent time with a river? Or a lake or small pond for that matter. They are all dying. Not one at a time, at the usual glacial pace nature moves, but all at once. This, experts believe, is the reason why droughts like the one that the country is experiencing this year are more severe, and why the floods are more devastating each passing year. Those who have been working on water conservation have been flagging the imminent catastrophe that is bound to follow the death of the rivers. However, like all wise words, it has little currency in a world where green has become a synonym for cash. By now, vast stretches of our majestic, meandering rivers have been gored by massive machines to extract sand; every concrete structure holds in it what once was river.

This cruel summer that is frying the once-fertile fields into barren, cracked expanses is perhaps the best opportunity to start anew. It requires a concerted effort involving people and governments, and engineers and scientists. The latter are needed for the first step—finding a viable alternative for river sand in construction. Here, ‘viable’ is the key, as there are already alternatives ranging from offshore sands to fly ash from thermal power plants. But this has not satisfied the construction sector, which is singularly responsible for most of the damage.

Government agencies should ensure strict compliance of guidelines on not just sand mining but also letting out municipal waste into the rivers, a phenomenon that follows every urbanisation story in India. Fines should be so prohibitively expensive that mining and polluting become infeasible even illegally. This is not a matter of philanthropy. This is not tree-hugging. This is much more fundamental an issue—if survival is an instinct that we possess, it is time we pay attention to our rivers. They are dying. This perhaps is our last chance.

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The New Indian Express
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