Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the Yamuna. Now the river played a part in the city's life only as an object of neglect and
disgust.
On the riverbank, I gave a man called Ravinder a few hundred rupees and we went out
in his flat-bottomed wooden rowboat. Sitting next to Kakoli, my translator for the day, I
peered over the edge as Ravinder worked the oars. The surface of the water was a dark
gradient of billowing grays interrupted by little bubbles. Methane, I assumed. We coasted
into a stretch of water spread with an unfamiliar film, not quite as colorful as a petroleum
rainbow, not quite as thick as the skin of milk on a boiling pot of chai. Lumpy black gob-
bets dotted its surface. We needed only our noses to understand that the water was dark
with more than Shiva's grief. We were floating not on a river, but on a great urban outflow,
a stream of human sewage that was standing in for the river that had dug the channel.
The Yamuna was full of shit.
It gets this way in stages. Emerging clean from the Himalayas, the river receives peri-
odic doses of sewage and industrial runoff as it crosses the plain. Then, about 140 miles
upstream from Delhi, it meets the Hathnikund Barrage—a multi-gated dam built to con-
trol the river's flow. At Hathnikund, the greater part of the river's water is diverted into
the Eastern and Western Yamuna Canals. These canals, both hundreds of years old, were
originally devised for irrigation, but an increasing amount of the water they divert is used
for city water supplies, especially Delhi's. The city's population has grown more than 600
percent over the past fifty years, drastically increasing its water use.
In India, as in so many places, tension over water is the driving force behind an incred-
ible swath of environmental and political problems. In this case, to make up for water spir-
ited away by the megalopolis downstream, farmers in the region pump massive volumes of
groundwater. The overextraction is so intense that it has lowered the water table to below
the level of the riverbed itself, meaning that south of Hathnikund, the Yamuna simply per-
colates straight into the ground. The river runs dry. Except during the several months of the
monsoon, the Yamuna essentially ceases to exist as it approaches Delhi.
Because it would otherwise disappear into the riverbed, water extracted for Delhi is
transported via the Munak Escape, a fork of the Western Yamuna Canal that itself receives
a helping of industrial waste and domestic sewage. The water then collects behind the
Wazirabad Barrage, on Delhi's northern margin. (Here it is augmented with water brought
from the Ganga, of all places, making the Ganga a tributary of one of its own tributaries.)
