Our lakes and rivers are the very source of life itself and yet they’ve never been more threatened. Today, all major water bodies in India face the threats of severe pollution, indiscriminate dumping of garbage, pumping of untreated sewage, direct discharge of harmful chemical waste, illegal sand mining and encroachments on river banks. It’s a serious situation that’s crying out for attention, and no short-term, easy solutions seem to be in sight. In the meanwhile, for those who may be interested in knowing more about our lakes and rivers, Harini Nagendra’s and Seema Mundoli’s new book, Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities, is an outstandingly brilliant read.
‘For millennia, our cities have prospered and grown in the cradles of civilisation – fertile lands blessed with rivers, lakes, seas and oceans. From the origins of life on earth, right down to its downfall, biblical or otherwise, water has been integral to the human story. In this passionate and extensively researched tribute to the elixir that sustains us all, authors Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli take us on a panoramic view of the water bodies of India and the urgent need to address their emergent ecological threats. From the Yamuna in Delhi to the Cauvery in Karnataka and the Pichola Lake in Udaipur to the Brahmaputra in Assam, this book is epic in its sweep and yet deeply moving in its intimate concerns,’ says the publisher’s note. ‘Interspersed with anthropological, legal and scientific vignettes of the water are fascinating anecdotes, ditties, myths and monsters blue and green. This book also brings into dialogue a vast range of colourful characters-from medieval poets to colonial masters and modern scientists-to paint for us a tapestry of connected histories and ring a timely knell for saving the very ecological systems that have sustained us for ages,’ it adds.
With the publisher’s permission, here is an extract from Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities
The sacred Yamuna originates in the Yamunotri glacier, high up in the Himalayan mountains, where the river water is cold, pure and crystal clear. The waters gush down the mountains, tumbling over rocks and boulders, until the river meets its first impediment at the Tajewala Barrage, 172 km from its origin. After this, the river never regains its original purity. By the time the Yamuna reaches the capital city of Delhi, it has become a toxic cocktail of waste.
Amoeba-like, the boundaries of Delhi have shifted shape. Over the centuries, various rulers established at least nine ancient and medieval cities in Mehrauli, Siri Fort, Firozabad, Shahjahanabad, Shergarh, Quila Rai Pithora and nearby sites. Despite a dizzy dance of changing allegiances, the Yamuna River remained a constant fixture in the lives of the city’s residents, supplying the city with water through a network of tributaries and streams, canals, stepwells and tanks. One of the oldest such water-holding structures in Delhi is Surajkund. This tank was built by Tomar Rajputs in the eighth century, along with Badkhal Lake. Hauz-i-Shamsi, the largest water tank in Delhi, was built in the thirteenth century by Sultan Iltutmish (father of Razia Sultan, the only woman monarch of Delhi). In the fourteenth century, Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the king of the Delhi Sultanate, diverted the waters of the Yamuna through a canal directly into his fort, Firoz Shah Kotla, thus ensuring that the wells in the fort never ran dry. These channels were later maintained and repaired by the Mughal kings Akbar and Jahangir, and further extended during Shah Jahan’s reign. By 1843, Shahjahanabad had 600 wells which supplied the city with water. Small streams were connected to ponds and tanks, and used to recharge groundwater, which then fed the wells and their larger counterparts, the baolis of Delhi.
By 1803, the city belonged to the British. The expanding colonial city needed an ever-increasing supply of water. The water bodies of Delhi were failing, becoming polluted and falling into disrepair. The Ali Mardan Khan Canal, constructed during Shah Jahan’s reign to conduct water from the Yamuna to the Red Fort, was an engineering marvel. Fed by the Yamuna and the Sabi rivers, the canal supplied many nearby tanks with water. By the mid-eighteenth century, this once-glorious canal lacked water. Although the British administration restored the canal in the early nineteenth century, they did not understand the importance of the connection between the canal and its tanks, leaving the tanks dry. In 1846, another tank was built to supply drinking water to Delhi, but its water became brackish and unfit for drinking within just a few years.
On their part, the British worried about the impact of traditional practices of night soil (human and animal faeces) disposal, in sewers and pits. Toxic discharge from these pits contaminated the subsoil, making its way to the Yamuna, giving rise to epidemics like cholera. Advancements in science and technology spurred their interest in finding technological solutions to the problem of water scarcity. By the mid-nineteenth century, advancements in water chemistry led to the development of quantitative tests to assess water quality. These tests convinced British administrators that much of Delhi’s drinking water was impure, unfit for consumption.
Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata) had moved to a piped water system to ensure the supply of clean water. Buoyed by this success, the British government directed the Delhi Municipal Committee (DMC) to develop a similar plan. In 1869, the DMC developed a proposal to supply piped water to Delhi, conveying it from unpolluted streams, canals and wells outside the city’s periphery. Although initial attempts were not very successful, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Delhi had a piped water network in place. Unfortunately, the city had also grown substantially by then. The waterworks system, sufficient for the needs of the nineteenth-century city, could only provide half the water the city required by the time it was built. The project also came with its social costs.
An entire hamlet, the village of Chandrawal, had to be removed and relocated to make way for the project. As the city grew, so did its appetite for water. By 1911, the British moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi. They searched for a suitable location to build the new capital, one that could showcase the majesty of the British Empire. After rejecting the east bank of the Yamuna because it was too swampy, and the west bank because it was already developed, they settled on an area that lay between the Yamuna and the central ridge of the Aravalli Hills. This became Lutyens’ Delhi. To supply the new capital with water, they built an additional pumping station on the Yamuna, but the shortage of water persisted. Alongside water supply, the quality of water continued to be a cause for concern. Alum was used to precipitate impurities and chlorine to purify the water. Yet contaminated sewage continued to make its way into Delhi’s water supply, causing frequent outbreaks of cholera and enteric diseases.
After a major flood in October 1955, the Yamuna River altered course, moving closer to the Najafgarh Channel. Once a part of the Sabi River, which flows down from the Aravalli Hills to Delhi, the Najafgarh Channel feeds into Najafgarh Lake. When the Yamuna shifted close to the sewage-contaminated waters of the Najafgarh Channel, the river waters became contaminated, affecting the water supply of Delhi and causing a jaundice outbreak. Despite pumping crores of rupees into cleaning the Yamuna, the situation has worsened. The Yamuna Action Plan-II was sanctioned in 2005, and the Delhi Jal Board initiated a plan to set up 60 km of drains in 2007. By 2018, the city had spent more than Rs 1500 crore to clean the river, to little effect. Though the Yamuna passes through Delhi for just 22 km (less than 2 per cent of the entire river’s course), it picks up about 80 per cent of its pollution load from the city. After the Wazirabad Barrage, where water from the Yamuna is collected and purified for drinking, the Yamuna collects polluted water from twenty-two drains. The waste carried by the river has almost doubled between 1982 and 2019. No wonder the polluted river continues to froth, spreading toxic foam across the region.
Shades Of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities
Authors: Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
Format: Hardcover / Kindle
Number of pages: 304 / 286
Price: Rs 399 / Rs 379
Available on Amazon
Book Excerpt: Shades of Blue
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