Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

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 environmental 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 priority. 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 previous two decades. Most of it had been spent on the construction of sewage treatment infrastructure.

At best, it had been a vast reenactment of the coin collectors’ work, with the government pouring billions of rupees into the rivers, and builders of infrastructure standing by to dredge the money out.

The problem with this approach was that building sewage treatment plants was simply not enough. “We are spending huge amounts of money from the World Bank, from all other sources, taking loans,” Trivedi said. But little of the wastewater infrastructure created with that money actually worked. “You have taken the loan and created it, and they don’t have the money to operate it! It can work only when there is continuous flow of funds.” He shook his head, smiling. “When you create a sewage treatment plant, you first figure out how it will work for twenty or thirty years. But we never looked at that. We just implemented the YAP.”

“Which has no effect,” I hazarded.

“Which has no effect,” he confirmed.

Because Delhi doesn’t charge for sewage treatment, there is no flow of funds to sustain the treatment plants. Not that most people in Delhi could afford sewage treatment fees in the first place. A further problem is the helter-skelter pattern of development in the city. A large proportion of Delhi’s neighborhoods have sprouted up unplanned, without any thought for how services like water and sewage treatment could be delivered, even if they were affordable. Sewage treatment plants built with YAP funds were therefore placed where there was room for the plants, not where there was sewage to be treated.

Trivedi thought any viable solution had to address the depletion of groundwater in the river basin. That meant promoting rainwater harvesting, a practice with deep traditional roots in India. Village ponds and earthen bunds can allow monsoonal water to stand long enough for it to seep into the ground and recharge the depleted water table. “Thereby, we can reduce the depletion of the groundwater table in the entire catchment area,” Trivedi said. “And if the water table comes up, all the rivers will start flowing again.”

Having told me how to heal every river in India, he put his hands on the table. There was, I knew, another shoe to drop.

The rainwater harvesting, I asked. Was that something that would happen at the local level?

“Yes,” he said. “But government always spends money on big, big projects. When people suggest something small, like five thousand dollars for a small reservoir or village pond…” He trailed off, still smiling. “They say, ‘No, no, no. This is very small.’”

The one place where Delhi retains a bit of the river life that it ought to have is Ram Ghat, which clings to the west side of the river immediately below the Wazirabad Barrage. It is behind this barrage, which doubles as a bridge to east Delhi, that the city’s drinking water supply collects.

Ram Ghat is a bank of broad stairs dropping precipitously to the river from a wooded area next to the road. The upstream edge of the ghat abuts the barrage, itself several stories tall. Thick concrete pylons support its roadway, with metal doors in between, to hold back the upstream part of the river. In monsoon season, large volumes of water are allowed through, but on the day Mansi and I visited, all the doors were closed but for one, and even it was open only a crack. Several boys laughed and swam in the minor waterfall that spilled from its edge. Because we were upstream of the sewage drains that emptied into the river, the water here was brighter and clearer, and free of those unmentionable floating clumps. On the far side of the river we could see modest fields of vegetables. There were small fields like this up and down the floodplain, even in Delhi.

At the top of the stairs, a man wearing office clothes bought a tiny tray of birdseed from a vendor, placed it in front of some ravens on the parapet, and prayed. On the submerged steps at the bottom, a boy lingered knee-deep in the river, collecting plastic bags and scraps of wood. A few yards downriver, a woman heaved a two-foot-tall idol of Ganesh into the water. By the time his elephant-headed form had disappeared under the surface, she was already starting the climb back, dusting off her hands as she went.

I walked down the tall stairs to the water. On the bottom step, a man in a white undershirt was dragging a magnet through the water. The coin collectors were innovating. “To live, you have to do something,” he said, in the universal wisdom offered to journalists who ask people about their humble, dangerous, or generally crummy jobs. And there were worse ways to spend your life than wandering up and down Ram Ghat in your shorts.

On the lowest step, I hunkered by the water. I wasn’t about to take a holy dip, as they call it, but this seemed like the cleanest spot on Delhi’s riverbank to get tight with the goddess of love. If it was good enough for Shiva, it was good enough for my tiny, writhing knot of a heart.

I put a hand in the water. Minute forms darted away. Water bugs. Something still lived in the Yamuna. Under the heat of the day, the river was cool against my skin. Coliform-rich, but refreshing. I lifted a handful of water. How much of this was Ganga? How much from the Munak Escape? How much had diffused its way upstream from the nearest sewage outflow? I poured it over my head. Yamuna’s all-encompassing love dribbled through my hair, down the back of my neck, and soaked into the collar of my shirt.

A woman with a big white sack landed heavily on the lower step. Her daughter was with her. Together they upended the sack. Flowers and small pots tumbled out, along with what looked like disposable food trays: the leavings of some devotion performed elsewhere, which would only be completed once they had drowned the ritual scraps. Another couple overturned a bag of charcoal. Hydrocarbon rainbows spread across the water. A pair of boys standing in the river immediately started picking out the hunks.

But coins and charcoal were not the only things that got fished out at Ram Ghat. At the top of the stairs, we met Abdul Sattar, sitting cross-legged on a small rug he had rolled out on a shady bit of the parapet. He was in his mid-forties, and wore a black sweatshirt and a pencil mustache.

Sattar was the self-appointed lifeguard of Ram Ghat. By vocation he was a boatman, like Ravinder, but that was auxiliary to his real passion, which was pulling attempted suicides out of the river. He had been doing it for more than twenty-five years.

With Mansi translating, I asked him if a lot of people tried to kill themselves there. He waved his head emphatically. “Bahot,” he said. A lot. We were only a week and a half into March, and there had already been two attempts this month.

“I didn’t let it happen,” Sattar said. “I can see them coming in. They generally look distressed.” He had a crew of youngsters who hung out by the river. Whenever he spotted someone who looked upset, he would direct his helpers to follow the person around, so a rescuer would be close at hand in the case of a suicide attempt.