Arvind Kejriwal was off the mark when he said Yamuna gets “poisoned” in Haryana. The river, in fact, is still in decent health at its entry point into Delhi from Haryana. It’s along the banks of the capital that life gets sucked out of Yamuna, by the system of drains that empties into it.
What Kejriwal could have brought up is that Yamuna’s flow drops sharply by the time it reaches Delhi, choking the river and making it vulnerable to pollution.
Nevertheless, there’s politics to thank for drawing attention to Yamuna that has been stewing in muck for decades, depriving the capital of the ecological and aesthetic benefits of a river and a riverfront.
Yamuna wasn’t an election issue till Kejriwal brought it up in the Delhi assembly campaign earlier this year. It gave BJP, which went to form the new govt, ammunition to attack the Kejriwal-led AAP regime for its failure to clean up Yamuna over the decade it was in office. It also drew a manifesto promise from the saffron party to clean up Yamuna in three years.
How did it come to this?
Yamuna is, in effect, two rivers. The one that originates in the Banderpoonch glacier and gurgles down the Garhwal ranges of Uttarakhand changes remarkably at Hathni Kund barrage just after it enters Haryana as its waters are diverted into the western and eastern Yamuna irrigation canals.
At Hathni Kund, the river’s original flow is reduced by around 80%. Yamuna is barraged again at Wazirabad in Delhi – for the capital to source its drinking water from. What remains of the river is a turbid stream.
Yamuna also receives an urban shock. Around 22km of its 52km course in the capital is through densely populated areas. Seventeen drains, big and small – principal among them Najafgarh drain that flows down all the way from South Haryana – empty into an already compromised Yamuna in this stretch, delivering the sucker punch.
A river of sewage is born
According to a Jan 30, 2025 monitoring report of Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), Yamuna is still in decent health when it enters Delhi at Palla, with 6mg/l of dissolved oxygen (DO), 3mg/l biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and faecal coliform at 950 MPN/100ml (see graphic on how to read a river’s health). Ammoniacal nitrogen was 1.2mg/l, well within standard.
At Wazirabad barrage 30km away, Yamuna’s flow reduces by another 90%. What goes downstream is spillage, and hereon begins the assault on the river. Near Signature Bridge, which Delhi boasts as a modern landmark, Yamuna’s water quality deteriorates sharply at the outflow of Najafgarh drain.
The bridge, which the AAP govt promoted as a tourist destination, is best enjoyed gazing at its towering pylons. Look down and you have a bird’s eye view of the Yamuna turning dark as copious filth from the drain spikes the river. The 57km Najafgarh drain brings with it effluents not just from Delhi but also the large urban sprawl of Gurgaon. It is the spine of the capital’s drainage system, with 126 other drains emptying into it at different points.
After Najafgarh drain, less than a kilometre downstream at ISBT bridge, Yamuna’s BOD reaches 46 (tolerable limit is 3), DO drops to nil and faecal coliform soars to 5,20,000 (outer range of tolerable in 2,500). At its exit in Jaitpur, Yamuna has a BOD of 70 and faecal coliform of 84,00,000. DO remains nil.
For a measure of how much worse Yamuna is today than it was a decade ago, here are the exit readings at Jaitpur from Feb 2013 – BOD 20, faecal coliform 64,000 and DO 1. And for a measure of how bad it can get – since the parameters keep changing – Yamuna’s worst year on record is 2019-20 when its faecal coliform level reached 1,40,00,00,000 (in Nov 2019).
Only around 300km of Yamuna’s 1,376km course is clear or pristine – predominantly the part in Uttarakhand. Around 80% of the sources that pollute the rest of its stream come from Delhi, according to Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). The largest share of Delhi’s pollution, say sources closely associated with efforts to clean up the river, comes from a single source – Najafgarh drain. Towards the river’s exit, several other drains like Shahdara, Tughlaqabad and Sahibabad also empty into Yamuna. So, by the time it enters UP, Yamuna is a river steeped in sewage.
…32 years & Rs 8,000cr of utter failure
There has, over the years, been huge investment in setting up sewage treatment plants (STPs) to prevent precisely this, under the Yamuna Action Plan that was rolled out in 1993. So far, under this plan, an estimated Rs 8,000 crore has been spent just on cleaning up Yamuna in Delhi.
According to a March 2023 note from Delhi’s environment department, between 2017 and 2021, Rs 6,500 crore was spent on Yamuna.
Delhi has 37 STPs that are supposed to prevent Yamuna from getting polluted. But the river’s festering coliform levels show they are not doing their job. There are also untapped sewage paths into the river from the national capital’s unauthorised colonies.
Few rivers have seen as many judicial and bureaucratic interventions as Yamuna. In 2012, environmentalist Manoj Mishra approached National Green Tribunal with a petition to stop sewage flowing into Yamuna. In Jan 2015, NGT chairman Justice Swatanter Kumar spelt out a ‘Maili se Nirmal Yamuna’ action plan. Two years later, it translated into a Nirmal Yamuna Rejuvenation Plan.
The same year, after Supreme Court entrusted its own Yamuna hearings – happening since 1993 – with NGT, a panel that is now called River Rejuvenation Committee (RRC) and is headed by Del- hi’s environment secretary, was formed. RRC’s task was to ensure Yamuna’s critical stretch of 22km in Delhi from Wazirabad to Asgarpur attains BOD of at least 3, minimum DO of 5 and maximum faecal coliform level of 500.
Besides Yamuna Action Plan and Justice Kumar’s action plan, there were several Supreme Court and NGT orders, an interceptor sewer project, and National Mission for Clean Ganga focusing on Yamuna as a tributary that had the common objective of cleaning the river up. manager (water) at CSE told TOI one of the biggest problems that has manifested today was not addressed through all these interventions – connecting unauthorised colonies to the capital’s main sewerage.
Delhi has a huge population living in illegal colonies.
“Most of the expenditure was on building a sewage network and STPs, faecal sludge management from septic tanks, etc. But unauthorised colonies remained untapped. Toilets here are not connected to the sewerage network. They use septic tanks which are emptied and carried by tankers and the faecal sludge is dumped in 22 drains that eventually go to Yamuna. This negates STPs,” said Sengupta. She estimates that around 40% of Delhi’s faecal sludge evades STPs.
Solutions obvious, approach wrong all along
The answers aren’t that difficult – increase the river’s flow, stop sewage from entering the river, revive floodplains and wetlands, clean up Najafgarh drain on a war footing, and coordinate with Haryana and UP to plug sewage and effluents. But for three decades, this has proved to be an impossible job.
Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of South Asian Network on Dams Rivers and People, said, “This is because no one ever addressed the governance problem. They kept spending on new infrastructure, committees, technology, etc, but refused to address the main issue. You need governance to ensure funds and efforts are directed at the right solution.”
Opacity around STPs is a problem. Like air pollution data, real-time river pollution data should also be in the public domain, both for transparency and accountability. “Industrial internet of things can be deployed to monitor STPs round the clock,” said Sanjay Sharma from Indian Water Quality Association. “Current monitoring is vague and one sample a day does not work. There must also be reverse monitoring in case STPs detect industrial effluents to assess where those are coming from.”
Recently, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) suggested a 10-point action plan to the Delhi govt for a cleaner Yamuna in three years. Among other things, it recommended a relook at the 1994 water-sharing treaty to improve Yamuna’s flow from Hathni Kund, better monitoring of the river and regular desilting, and adopting a jal shakti ministry-like model that brings all agencies linked to Yamuna under a central regulator.
Desilting Wazirabad barrage will also improve flow, something the BJP govt can take up as a priority. But ultimately, it will have to bargain for a larger share of water from the Upper Yamuna Water Board, which will be a hard task because the Yamuna canals are water lifelines for Haryana.
“The pondage area of Wazirabad must be desilted. More than 60% is silted. If that is fixed, the problem can be resolved to an extent, so that we don’t only rely on a deal with Haryana for water,” said a Delhi govt source involved in efforts to revive the river.
A 2014 study by Delhi University professor Shashank Gupta, Jamia Millia Islamia’s Vikram Soni and Diwan Singh from Natural Heritage First inferred that about 50%-60% of the virgin flow is necessary throughout the year to maintain the health of a river system. Yamuna receives only around 16% of its original flow in non-monsoon months.
