This year, just before Chhath Puja, the Yamuna looked unusually calm. The thick layer of froth that had covered the river for weeks suddenly disappeared. News channels called it a miracle. The new BJP-led Delhi government under Chief Minister Rekha Gupta was praised for “cleaning” the river and restoring its sanctity.
Few bothered to ask how. The truth was simple. Some extra water had been released from the Hathni Kund Barrage upstream, and chemicals were sprayed to break the foam. The froth disappeared for the cameras, not because the river had been cleaned, but because its pollution was temporarily diluted. The Yamuna was made to ‘look’ better, not ‘become’ better.
In reality, this cosmetic clean-up became part of a larger show, a city trying to impress its voters, or perhaps relatives of Delhi Voters, who lived in Bihar. With the Bihar elections approaching, and Delhi’s large Bihari population preparing for Chhath Puja, a clean-looking Yamuna became politically important. Clearly Yamuna turned into a prop, in this political theatre.
However, the real story of the Yamuna is not about a few days of foam or water releases. It is about how the river has been dying slowly, and how we continue to destroy the very system that keeps it alive, its floodplains, and that found itself in the middle of land movers this time again.
Floodplains: The River’s Lungs
The Yamuna’s floodplains once stretched across nearly 9,700 hectares in Delhi. These open, fertile lands are not empty spaces waiting for development, they are the river’s lungs and safety valves. They store excess water during floods, recharge groundwater, support biodiversity, and act as natural filters for pollutants.
But today, these floodplains are being treated as construction sites, event venues, and real estate opportunities. From massive religious gatherings to concrete ghats built in the name of “beautification,” every new project chips away at what little remains of this fragile ecosystem.
This year’s Chhath Puja preparations once again saw bulldozers on the floodplains. Concrete roads, platforms, and pavilions were built to make the banks “festival-ready,” in open violation of the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) directions. Soil was levelled, vegetation was cleared, and yet another portion of the Yamuna’s breathing space was sealed under cement.
Governments justify these actions as development or faith-based infrastructure, but in truth, this is lazy and escapist governance. It is easier to build roads and ghats than to clean drains and restore flow. It is easier to decorate the banks than to save the river.
How the City Turned Its Back on the River
The decline of the Yamuna is not a recent failure; it is the result of long neglect and misplaced priorities. When the British built New Delhi on Raisina Hill, they deliberately kept it away from the river, which they saw as dirty and disease-prone. Drains were designed to carry waste downhill, away from the elite, into the Yamuna.
After independence, the same thinking continued. The river became a dumping ground, a space for settlements and projects that didn’t fit elsewhere. Urban planning ignored ecology. Successive governments, regardless of party, saw the riverbanks as land banks.
Every time the river floods, which it must, because it’s a living system, the city blames it for inconvenience. But floods are not disasters; they are the river’s way of remembering its boundaries. What’s truly disastrous is our refusal to respect those boundaries. And these floods belong to the floodplains, recharging the ground water as well as recharging the river.
It is important to highlight that the encroachment of the floodplains is not new. The process began decades ago, almost like a slow erasure of the river’s space from the city’s map. After Partition, refugee colonies were established along the Yamuna. Later, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), created in 1957 to plan the city’s growth, began treating the floodplain as wasteland, ripe for construction.
Projects such as the Asian Games Village, Delhi Secretariat, and later the Akshardham Temple came up on what were once active flood zones. Even though environmentalists and local communities protested, courts and governments repeatedly regularised these constructions. Once a precedent was set, more followed.
During the Emergency in the 1970s, large-scale evictions were carried out under the guise of ‘beautification’. Thousands were removed from the riverbanks, only for the same land to be used for government offices and stadiums. Each decade brought a new reason to occupy the floodplain - urban development, religious revival, cultural promotion, but the outcome was always the same - less space for the river, more concrete for the city.
A Biologically Dead River
Today, over 75 percent of the floodplains are encroached upon. What remains is fragmented and degraded, stripped of trees and natural wetlands. The river, squeezed between embankments and construction, has lost its ability to clean and regulate itself.
Also, we are not talking about just any river; Yamuna is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. According to official data, over 80 percent of Delhi’s sewage flows untreated into the river through major drains like Najafgarh, Shahdara, and Barapullah. The water that enters Delhi from Haryana is relatively clean, but by the time it leaves for Uttar Pradesh, it carries the waste of nearly two crore people.
The river’s dissolved oxygen levels, a measure of its ability to sustain life, often stay near zero. In simple terms, the Yamuna is biologically dead through most of its 22-kilometre stretch in Delhi. Thousands of crores have been spent under the Yamuna Action Plan, yet the results are barely visible. Sewage treatment plants (STPs) have been built but operate far below capacity. Even the water that is treated often finds its way back into polluted drains.
Delhi’s approach to cleaning the Yamuna has focused on pipes, pumps, and paperwork, but not on people or ecology. The city has treated the river as a drainage line to carry away what it doesn’t want to deal with.
What the city often forgets is that the health of the Yamuna depends on the health of its floodplains. You can’t clean a river if you choke the land that supports it. The floodplains are where the river breathes, regenerates, and revives itself after every monsoon. When we build over them, we are not just violating environmental rules, we are cutting off the river’s ability to heal, almost its core strength.
Cleaning the River Means Saving Its Plains
Scientists and planners have repeatedly pointed out that restoring the Yamuna’s floodplains would be the most effective and natural way to clean the river. Vegetation and wetlands on these plains help absorb pollutants, improve groundwater, and allow seasonal floods to spread and settle without causing damage.
Instead of working with nature, we keep working against it. Each new ghat or “riverfront development” project takes the city further from real solutions. These “beautification drives” are short-term and cosmetic, they offer visual comfort while hiding the structural decay. True rejuvenation will come only when we protect the floodplains, reduce pollution at its source, and ensure continuous flow in the river.
Today, every government promises to clean the Yamuna. Yet, most efforts stop at surface-level gestures, inaugurating new plants, painting walls, or building more ghats. The riverfront is cleaned and not the river.
In conclusion, the Yamuna is Delhi’s mirror. Its condition reflects the city’s choices, our governance, our greed, and our apathy. We have forgotten that the river is not separate from us. It is our source of water, our protection from floods, our climate regulator, and our spiritual anchor.
When we destroy its floodplains, we are weakening the city’s lifeline. When we allow untreated waste to flow in, we are poisoning our own water. When we build over wetlands, we are writing the script for our future floods and droughts.
The Yamuna hasn’t failed us. We have failed her, again!
(Vimlendu Jha is an environmental activist who currently heads Swechha, a Delhi-based youth and environment organisation. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)