Delhi

“Delhi government on Tuesday announced its ambitious plan to develop the Yamuna riverfront at Dhai Pushta in Sonia Vihar. In the first phase, a 5km stretch will be developed. It will have walking and cycling tracks, wetland, gardens, international centre for kayaking, parks, boating facility , among other things.”

“Air quality has plummeted as a thick haze envelops the city of more than 25 million people. If you couldn’t smell and taste the toxic filth hanging in the air, you might think that winter had come early to the Indian capital, New Delhi... smog,a dangerous mixture of pollutants that has returned to the city with record force. Delhi’s air quality has been deteriorating for years. Breakneck growth, coupled with scant official regard for the environmental impact of the city’s rapid expansion, has turned it into one of the world’s most polluted urban centers... Giant fires lit by farmers in neighboring states to clear their lands for the winter crop-planting season add to the annual scourge, spreading smoke across northern India. Delhi’s landlocked geography magnifies the impact of these factors... the pollutants linger over the national capital, especially when wind speeds fall, as they have over recent days.”

“Migratory birds are making a beeline for Delhi and its outskirts... Green pigeons, sparrows, hawks, kingfishers, robins, Indian hornbills, parrots and sometimes even peacocks are found on the green belt. Mute bulbuls are also seen in sizable number, preening themselves on trees or electric and TV cable wires. Talking of bulbuls, the fabled birds of myth and legend... Well known birder, Dr Salim Ali has identified over twelve varieties of bulbuls. The cheery notes of the red-whiskered bulbul, the pleasant call of the black-headed yellow bulbul, the half-a-dozen tinkling notes of the ruby-throated bulbul, and the joyous melody of the red-vented bulbul are worth noticing in the capital.”

“In Delhi today, pollution is one of the most critical problems facing the public and concerned authorities. According to the World Health Organisation, Delhi is the fourth most polluted city in the world in terms of suspended particulate matter. The growing pollution is responsible for increasing health problems. The deteriorating environment is the result of population pressure and haphazard growth. Industrial development has been haphazard and unplanned. Only about 20% of the industrial units are in approved industrial areas; the remainder are spread over the city in residential and commercial areas... Delhi has more vehicles than the three metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai combined.”

“Delhi can be mapped by its waste centres. East, west, north, south — a special kind of waste activity plots a city graph. In the extreme north, at Mundka, huge plastic waste mandis keep hearth-sized reprocessing factories running: spaghetti- like melted plastic rolls out, to be cooled by fans cut into pellets by shredders. The northwest is a fractured remnant of its pre-1995 glory. Then there was Jwalapuri, the biggest PVC market in India. When it was gutted in a fire that year, the shops disaggregated into individual hillocks of plastic, separated by gates and boundary walls... In the neighborhood of Welcome Colony, trans-Yamuna, old materials of all kinds stand transformed. Computer monitors are converted into fourteen-inch television sets, old wooden junk into usable furniture.”

“The draft bill puts forward sweeping changes and suggests creating a central agency headed by the Prime Minister to monitor the Yamuna and its basin from the river’s source. Called the National River Regulation Authority, the agency will have, among other powers, a say in any revival plan a state wants to implement and the right to regulate the use of the river basin. The Yamuna flows through five states and the existing law allows a state government control over the portion of the river that passes through that state. This often creates differences of opinion and poses a problem in the river’s cleaning. While the legislation has been proposed exclusively for the Yamuna, it will extend to the entire country if it does go on to become a law after approval from Parliament.”

“Coming into Delhi by aircraft from an eastward direction on a day of good visibility, two distinct features of Delhi’s topography can be clearly identified—theYamuna River running from north to south and the Delhi Ridge with the biggestbroad green belt within the city... The Northern Ridge forest is spread over 87hectares and the New Delhi Ridge forest covers 864 hectares. They play a very important role as the ‘green lungs’ of the city today. Out of Delhi’s total urban areaof 44,777 hectares, 8,422 hectares has been marked for ‘Greens’ in the MasterPlan Document 2001.”

“The authorities here managed to do very little about the city’s soaring wild monkey population — until the deputy mayor toppled from his terrace to his deathas he tried to fend off a gang of the animals... The phenomenon is a side effect of India’s rapid urbanization. As Delhi expands, with half a million new residents moving in every year, the green areas in and around the capital, which for centuries have been the monkeys’ habitat, grow smaller. Their territory encroached on, many monkeys uproot to settle in the city center... While most of the bleaker manifestations of the anarchic expansion — the slums, the urban squalor — are hidden from the government’s showpiece center, the monkey invasion is visible at the heart of the leafy city of New Delhi, remarked upon by every visiting foreign dignitary.”

“The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India.In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastructure — and yet, still worshiped... In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead. As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water. As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day. Coursing through the capital, the river becomes a noxious black thread. Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface. It is hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. A government audit found last year that the level of fecal coliform, one measure of filth, in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.”

“The pahadi still has a breadth of several kilometers, forming a compact rocky plateau between Surajkund and Sirohi. Its harsh character, with unconsolidated rocks and ravines and a sparse scrubby vegetation, imparts a specific geographical identity to the western edge of Ballabgarh. The vegetation is made up of species such as kikar (Acacia arabica), karil (Capparis aphyllla) and ber (Zizyphus nummularia), although the tree cover around temple complexes can be visibly different. Tree species known locally as gugal, gaund kathira, parsendhu, gular, khimi, imli, aam, kadamba, khajur and jamaun are encountered in the Parsaun ravine... A spectacular sacred forest of dhau or dhoy trees, spread over several acres and supported by three villages, still flourishes around Gudariya Baba’s shrine at Mangar. In the midst of a thorny, scrubby vegetation, these forest patches illustrate the limited but important ways in which the perceptions and ecological wisdom of rural inhabitants and temple priests have helped sustain a variegated floristic composition.”

“New Delhi will be a primitive, overcrowded slum buried in garbage by 2001 unless immediate measures to contain pollution, overpopulation and chaotic traffic conditions are implemented, says the Indian capital’s main planning body. The city slums that now comprise 28 per cent of Delhi will encroach on all available space in two years... Officials said around 2,000 tonnes of pollutants are released daily into the city’s atmosphere, where the incidence of respiratory diseases is 12 times the national average. About 12 per cent of children in Delhi are asthmatic due to pollution, which is expected to rise by 72 per cent in five years.”

“In 1995, the Central Pollution Board reported high levels of zinc, nickel, lead, chromium, and copper concentrated in the river Yamuna, a river which flows past the capital city of Delhi and into the Ganga at Allahabad. Researchers from Nehru University in Delhi have also reported PCB concentrations as high as 782 parts per billion and have detected the presence of DDT, hexachloro hydrocarbons, and cyclodiene in the wastewater entering the Yamuna River.”