New Delhi's Urban Growth Killing the Yamuna River

"The Indian government has spent 20 billion rupees, or almost $500-million, trying to clean the polluted Yamuna. Yet the... river...is so contaminated it can hardly sustain marine life.

Garbage cascades down its banks and gives off the fetid stench of a cesspool, blighting a river that extends 1,376 kilometres from the Himalayas to the holy Ganges. From 1993 to 2005, pollution levels more than doubled, and they continue to rise.

"The river is dead; it just has not been officially cremated," said Sunita Narain, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, one of India's top environmental watchdog groups.

What went wrong with the Yamuna is increasingly characteristic of India's major cities: unchecked urban growth combined with poor government oversight. The problem is not only in Delhi, which dumps 57 per cent of its waste into the Yamuna.

The problem in New Delhi pivots on the frightening fact that only 55 per cent of the city's 15 million residents are connected to the city's sewage system. The rest flush their bathwater, waste water and just about everything else down pipes and into drains, many of them open, that empty into the Yamuna.

...75 to 80 per cent of the river's pollution is a result of raw sewage. Combined with industrial runoff, it totals more than three billion litres of waste a day, a quantity well beyond the river's assimilative capacity. The frothy mix is so glaring it can be viewed on Google Earth."