Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
I
n Kerala, 700 villagers came together and brought
Kuttemperoor river in Alappuzha district back to life in 70
days. This river was in a bad state for almost 2 decades. 1
Another people’s movement from Kerala is revitalizing a
part of the Varattar river. 2 The famous revitalization of the Arvari river of
Rajasthan is the product of community effort driven by the village water
parliament. 3 In all these cases, ordinary villagers with meager monetary
means came together and made it happen. Many more rivers in our
country, like Ganga, Yamuna and Kaveri, can be revitalized if only people
contribute and participate. Every citizen will need to take a sankalpa or
determined pledge for this cause. Because of the severity of damage that
our rivers have suffered, 15-20 years may go by before they can come alive
again. Revitalizing them is very much possible, but it demands a certain
sense of urgency, sincerity and concerted effort in this direction. We need
to take inspiration from our Independence movement when men and
women across all strata of society – peasants, the middle class, the elite
and the intelligentsia – rallied together. It is time we rally once more to
free our rivers from destructive human activities.
The approach to water resource management in the last two decades
has been to manage demand efficiently – a major shift from the older
discourse of increasing the supply of water while assuming water in
nature is inexhaustible. The current paradigm of demand management
is a more sensitive approach to working on water resources compared to
the previous supply management paradigm. Technological innovations
of recent times have been focused on reducing the water consumption for
any specific activity.
But with respect to rivers, the discourses and efforts have been
solely focused on exploiting the existing quantum of available river water.
This includes building of dams, check-dams, canals or linking rivers. A
large number of dams are being built on rivers in northeast India to tap
hydroelectric power. If the actual quantum of water flowing through the
river reduces, all these engineering projects will become meaningless.
Therefore, the conservation and revitalization of rivers must take center
stage, to ensure augmentation of water flow in rivers with low to
zero flow.
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