Before you can see the Yamuna or hear its roar, you smell its nauseating stench from afar. When you finally glimpse it, the waterway appears to be a foaming sewer. Originating from the pristine Western Himalayas, by the time the Yamuna crosses Delhi, its water is filled with raw sewage, untreated industrial effluents, and solid garbage. Declaring the river “almost dead” in 2015, the Central Pollution Control Board had estimated that the 22-km Delhi stretch, which is a fiftieth of the river’s length, accounts for over three-fourths of its pollution. The situation is worse today.
An investigation by this newspaper showed that more than two-fifths of Delhi’s daily sewage of over 3,000 million litres, is disgorged untreated into the Yamuna. By the government’s own admission, it pushes the river’s bacterial concentration up to a toxic 2,85,000 MPN (most probable number, a measure of the dispersion of microorganisms); the safe limit for bathing is 500 MPN.
The pollution has killed most of the fish. Desperate fishermen, mostly migrants, still cast their nets for whatever little they can catch. The vegetables grown on its floodplains and sold in local markets are laced with phosphates and surfactants that cause the foaming. Meanwhile, the deadline for the Yamuna cleaning mission, for which ₹8,500 crore has already been allocated, has been pushed back from 2023 to 2025, and then to 2026. The Delhi Jal Board has received at least ₹1,200 crore of public funds as of 2023; however, our reportage indicates that most of the 37 sewage treatment plants are still outdated or underperforming.
India became one of the earliest cradles of civilisation because of its magnificent rivers—whether it’s the Sindhu-Saraswati basin in the west, the Vaigai and Cauvery in the south, or the Ganga-Yamuna belt across the north. Yet, the sad truth is that we are choking them with administrative apathy, which matches our polluting public culture. The cleanup of the once-putrid Thames in England and Kamo in Kyoto happened after decades-long public campaigns. The much longer Indian rivers need responsible riparian development alongside continuous conservation. To understand the shameful gap between tall promises flowing from the thousands of crores spent in the name of cleaning them and the reality, one need not look farther than the one flowing by the national capital.