New plan: Store monsoon water in ponds to revive Yamuna

The excessive rainfall in this year’s monsoon will provide a possible answer to revive the Yamuna to its past glory, said a plan prepared by the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA).

Updated on: Oct 24, 2010, 24:50:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The excessive rainfall in this year’s monsoon will provide a possible answer to revive the Yamuna to its past glory, said a plan prepared by the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA).

The plan is simple: replenish the Yamuna flood plain in Delhi and it will ensure the river has water even during dry months. “At present, there is no water in the river during the lean season because of decline in the water table,” said a concept note prepared by NGRBA engineers.

The river is dry most of the year, because Yamuna’s flood plain in Delhi is a concrete jungle, where underground water is extracted for different purposes resulting in the river running dry.

In the years when the monsoon is bad, the authority has suggested that treated sewage water can be flown into these ponds.

Most of Yamuna’s water is because of underground contribution — a reason for its high flow during monsoon — as most of the glacier melt is abstracted at Haryana’s Hathnikund barrage, from which just 250 cusecs of water is released for ecological purpose. “Practically, there is no water in the river after Jagadhari (in Haryana),” the note said.

To tide over this problem, the new plan proposed to maintain underground water level higher than the riverbed. To make this happen, the NGRBA identified areas between Palla in Haryana, from where Yamuna enters Delhi, and Wazirabad, where there is a barrage on the river, to create artificial ponds to store excess water that flows into the river during monsoon.

“These ponds will sustain the underground water table to ensure Yamuna is a perennial river,” said environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who will discuss the concept note with Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit this week, where it is likely to be approved. “The concept note assumes special importance in view of the fact that Yamuna finally is full in the Delhi stretch after 30 years.”

According to the data available with the Central Ground Water Board, Delhi allows 280 million cubic meters of water, half of its monsoon runoff, to flow out of the city as waste. If a portion of this water is stored in artificially created surface and sub-surface reservoirs for utilisation during non-monsoon period, many of the Yamuna’s water problems can be solved, the note said.

The authority identified more than 100 sq km of area between Palla and Wazirabad for the artificial ponds and has also asked to revive 35 waterbodies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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