Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
make an American environmentalist weak at the knees, it goes on to declare that “it shall be
the duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the natural environment, including
forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures.” And it's
backed up by an activist supreme court that issues binding rulings on specific problems.
Sounds like paradise.
Yet the results aren't great. Bharat Lal Seth, a researcher and writer at the Delhi-based
Centre for Science and Environment, told me that although the court system is activist, this
is merely because the executive branches of government shy away from taking action, leav-
ing it to the judiciary to issue edicts. But rulings are useless on their own.
“The judiciary feeds the [environmental] movement, and the movement feeds the ju-
diciary,” Seth said, sitting in CSE's open-air lunchroom. “You get a landmark ruling,
and…what's going to come of it?” The very fact that the Indian government doesn't feel
threatened or bound by such decisions makes it easier for the court to issue them.
Seth had put me in touch with R. C. Trivedi, a retired engineer from the Central Pollu-
tion Control Board, who joined us in the CSE canteen. He was a small, friendly man with
rectangular glasses and a short, scruffy beard, and probably knew more about the Yamuna's
problems than anyone else in the country. Even after a thirty-year career, he exuded enthu-
siasm for the details of India's water supply and wastewater system. He smiled when he
talked.
Before long, Trivedi was sketching a tangled diagram of the Yamuna in my notebook,
reeling off numbers for biochemical oxygen demand and flow rate, and marking off the
river's segments, from the still-flourishing Himalayan stretch, to the dry river below Hath-
nikund, to the Delhi segment—“basically an oxidation pond,” he said—and finally the “eu-
trophicated” lower stretch, where the nutrients from decomposing sewage lead to algae
blooms and oxygen depletion. “A lot of fish kill, we observe,” he said, tapping on his newly
drawn map. The eutrophicated segment runs for more than three hundred miles, until fi-
nally the Chambal, the Banas, and the Sind Rivers join it. There, he said, “it is good dilu-
tion. After that, Yamuna is quite clean.”
Listening to Trivedi and Seth, I could see that the brutal irony of the Yamuna's situation
was not only that its holiness did nothing to protect it, nor that India's tradition of environ-
mental law was so out of joint with the actual state of its environment. The worst part was
that, incredibly, cleaning up the country's rivers had for years been a major government pri-
ority. There was the Ganga Action Plan (or GAP, begun in 1985), and the Yamuna Action
Plan (YAP, 1993), and the National River Conservation Plan (1995), and YAP II (2005),
and YAP III (2011), among many other programs and plans, many of which continue to this
day. Such programs had received massive funding, more than half a billion dollars over the
