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Hardlook: A look at troubled waters of Yamuna floodplains one year after World Culture Festival -Sowmiya Ashok
-The Indian Express

An expert panel set up by the green tribunal has said it would take 10 years and Rs 42 crore to revive the Yamuna floodplains, after the damage caused by the World Culture Festival.

It was a mela Parvati never saw. The curtains had come up wherever she looked, even around the strip of land where her cows usually graze. “Bandhook leke seedhe khade hue the,” she said about men in uniform clutching guns, who would not let anyone through without a pass. She did see performers in bright costumes walk past her thatched hut, who had deboarded mini-buses coming in from the DND Expressway. Weeks before March 11, 12 and 13 last year, small farmers such as Parvati who cultivate vegetables on the floodplains on the west bank of the Yamuna — without permission — were asked to pack up and leave.

JCB machines uprooted tori, mooli, karela, palak, sitaphal and an assortment of edibles, while 50-tonne road rollers flattened, levelled and compacted the ground. Kaltu Ram, sitting outside his bamboo hut, said farmers in the area lost over Rs 4 lakh as a result. “They even destroyed the temple I had built for Vaishno Devi under that peepul tree. Since Babaji came, everything around here has changed…,” he said.

The “change” began with the 35th anniversary of the Bengaluru-based The Art of Living (AoL) Foundation, which chose the fragile Yamuna floodplains to celebrate “cultural diversity and global unity” through “cultural performances and messages of inspiration” at an event called the World Culture Festival.

The decision to choose the site as the venue was “specifically” to bring “awareness” about the river, argued AoL. But since then, the past year has seen a tussle over definitions: for some who moved court against the AoL foundation, the floodplains don’t constitute land but an extension of water. For the government, AoL and the farmers, it is solid land. And then there are those who question AoL’s very definition of river rejuvenation.

And in the midst of all this, the river continues to flow towards its seemingly inevitable end.

‘Festival was to raise awareness’

According to the festival’s website, 3.75 million people and over 36,000 artists from 155 countries visited the venue. “This was specifically to bring awareness about the river. We thought an international gathering will give more impetus to clean the river,” AoL spokesperson Jaideep Nath said.

Environmentalists said the floodplains are crucial to groundwater recharge, which meet 30 per cent of the city’s water requirements, and should under no circumstance be used for any other purpose. “It is the biggest area that recharges our groundwater, a welcome green space that moderates the city’s temperatures, and our biggest ally in climate change adaptation,” environmentalist Manoj Misra, from Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan, said.

But AoL questioned the very notion of the fragility of the floodplains. “The land there was already being cultivated and roads existed before we got there. In fact, we did not do compaction,” Nath said.

However, Noida environmentalist Anand Arya said it is a simple test to check if the ground has been compacted: “If you can drive anything other than a 4×4 SUV in the area, the damage is visible even by you.”

The foundation, however, maintained that the “floating stage” that spanned seven-acres — the size of six football fields — barely scratched the surface. Describing the stage, another AoL spokesperson said, “It’s the same principle as sadhus sitting on nails. The whole stage was constructed on countless small bamboo sticks; none of these dug into the ground.”

Over the last year, whether or not Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s AoL destroyed the Yamuna floodplains has been the point of contention in the country’s apex green court — the National Green Tribunal.

No, then yes

In January 2015, a year before work at the site began, the NGT passed an order to implement the ‘Maily Se Nirmal Yamuna Revitalisation Project, 2017’ — a roadmap to restore the floodplains, address the question of flow into the river, and take action to eliminate pollution.

That winter, Misra and his colleagues heard about the festival from local farmers and the festival’s website.

In his letter to then Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, Misra said: “The Yamuna river floodplains are currently under an NGT-mandated restoration plan. There is a legal injunction on any new construction there.”

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