Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Thanks to these inputs, there is water in the river at Wazirabad. But this water does not
flow south into Delhi, as the river once did. Instead, it is pumped out and treated, becoming
the basis of the city's water supply.
Nevertheless, there is water downstream of the Wazirabad Barrage, flowing the fourteen
miles through the heart of Delhi. For this stretch, the Yamuna takes the city itself as its
source, receiving something close to a billion gallons of wastewater each day, the vast ma-
jority of it domestic sewage, and more than half of it completely untreated.
So when local activists refer to the Yamuna as a
sewage canal,
as they do, it is no
figure of speech. Except during the monsoon, there would be no river in Delhi without this
wastewater.
Nor is it much of an exaggeration when people refer to the Yamuna as
dead.
The river's
level of dissolved oxygen (a good indicator of its capacity to sustain life) here falls to ap-
proximately one-tenth of the minimum government standard. Coliform levels (which in-
dicate a waterway's microbial danger) are incredibly high. The Indian government's upper
limit for safe bathing is five hundred coliforms per hundred milliliters of water. At points
in Delhi, though, the coliform count has exceeded seventeen
million.
The oarlocks squeaked and knocked as Ravinder worked the oars. He wore a Levi
Strauss T-shirt and blue track pants. The lifeless river was placid, almost pleasant. A light
breeze took the edge off the sewage smell.
“Who told you this is water?” he said. He told us that when he was young, he had been
able to see to the bottom of the river. Now, though, you could barely see a foot deep, and
clouds of inky muck eddied against the surface as we passed through shallow areas, the
ends of the oars black where they had touched the bottom.
Ravinder had grown up on the banks of the Yamuna, and still lived in one of the city's
few riverfront neighborhoods. And in his thirty-odd years he had seen the river change.
“There were lots of tortoises, but people sold them off. There were fish, and snakes,” he
said. “But now it's just a drain.” Although he lived mere steps away from the river, he
neither bathed in it nor allowed his family to. Only in July and August, during the annual
floods of the monsoon, would they get in the water. “During that period, the river becomes
very beautiful,” he said. “But within a month, it's over.”
Ravinder earned his money by taking people out to the center of the river to drop
offerings or cremation ashes in the water. Sometimes he made a thousand rupees in a
day—about twenty dollars. Sometimes he made nothing.
“I took two people out on the river earlier today to drop eighty kilos of charcoal in the
water,” he said. “A priest told them to. They invoked the name of the sun, and of Yamuna,
