The settlers were from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They grew vegetables, flowers, wheat and rice on the land rented from people who once held land lease given by the irrigation department. Pappu of Kaimur district in Bihar had rented about 6 ha at Nayabaans close to the Okhla Bird Park and DND flyway for Rs 6,000 per hectare for a year. While he farmed, his younger siblings studied in a makeshift school. He lost his month-old vegetable crop and has nowhere to go.

“They just came in the evening and trampled all over the vegetables and flooded the fields. Had they at least given us a notice we would not have sown crops. I had invested Rs 15,000-20,000 on wheat.”

said Sauraj Singh Kashyap of Hapur in Uttar Pradesh. H C Malhotra, a member of literacy organization Gyan Jyoti Vidyalaya, which set up the makeshift school in the area, said “These people have not made permanent structures on the riverbed. They were merely making a living out of agriculture.”

The irrigation department said it had cancelled all leases in 1999 but people continued to possess the land. “About seven people had pattas over this 25 ha. They filed cases in court and the hearing is on,” said a department official. “This was not a demolition exercise, so a court order was not needed. We just removed people who had encroached upon the department’s land,” added the official.

Sohanpal of Dallupura village in Noida does not agree.

“The land was given to us in 1948 when the British left, and ever since my family has been cultivating it. My case is being heard in the sub divisional magistrate’s court in Dadri,”

he said.

What development?

The Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department got some land in the National Capital Territory along the Yamuna Pushta road in 1956 for its maintenance. It is now transferring 362 ha of it in Delhi and 32.5 ha in Noida to the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority, also called Noida authority. The places where the land is being transferred are Madanpur Khadar, Sarita Vihar, Jamia Nagar and patches between Chilla Regulator and the Shahdara railway bridge. About 55.5 ha in Madanpur Khadar and 128 ha in Sarita Vihar and Jamia Nagar have been transferred.

The Noida authority said the land is being transferred for development but refused to specify the kind of development.

“The irrigation department is unable to do any development there because it does not come under its purview. We will take up development in accordance with the Masterplan of Delhi 2021. I cannot comment on the land in Noida,”

said Rajpal Kaushik, senior town planner of the authority.

Kaushik also said the Noida authority would request the Delhi Development Authority for change of land use, deepening people’s suspicion that it plans commercial development on the floodplain. Under the Delhi master plan most land near the Yamuna is for greenery and recreation.

An official of the irrigation department said the Noida authority would develop a green belt on the land. “Why can’t the department do so? By next year, I am sure there will be construction near the Okhla Bird Park,” said Anand Arya, a bird watcher who regularly visits the park.

The roaring of motorcycles shattered the early morning calm on the Yamuna floodplains in Delhi. On World Environment Day on June 5, a group of professionals, farmers, activists and journalists gathered for a bike rally along the river at the Yamuna Satyagraha site, where a bunch of farmers and activists have been campaigning against the construction of the Commonwealth Games Village on the riverbed for over 300 days.

As the river drifted into Faridabad its burden of sewage and industrial waste kept on increasing and the spectacular failure of the Yamuna Action Plan began to unfold. In Dhadhasiya, 40 km from Delhi, a sewage treatment plant (stp) of 20 million litre per day capacity sprawled over 7 hectares made a great showpiece of the plan, but it was shut down for upgradation. Untreated sewage was being discharged into the river. “Who is interested in knowing where their daily muck is going?” said the stp contractor with a shrug. Even when the plant functions, it treats the sewage only partially. In not even one place we visited, stps were functional.

“It is you people who have polluted the Yamuna. All the muck that comes down here is from Delhi. Everybody just shouts about cleaning it; in the evening aarti they chant prayers of Yamuna Maiya, but nobody takes a single step.” —HERO HIRALAL a boatman in Vrindavan

On the first night of the journey we slept in a temple of Tigaon village, 3 km from the river, in Faridabad. Heavy rainfall brought with it stench and mosquitoes which were effective in keeping everybody up and ready by 4 in the morning. The only source of inspiration throughout the night was the songs of fellow traveller Kishorilal Tomar. His land on the Yamuna floodplain in Delhi was acquired when Akshardham temple came up. Since then he has been tilling others’ land. The campaign against the Games Village turned this 50-year-old farmer into a poet, composer and singer. Armed with an earthen pot, Kishorilal would fling himself into high-pitched singing in all the villages we went to.

The next day took us to Manjhawli village in Ballabgarh. Dogs and cows easily crossing the river gave away its shallowness. A little ahead an embankment over Bhudiya Nala was being constructed. “You would think it’s a project of national importance. Actually, 40 hectares have been bought on the floodplain for making a golf course, hence the embankment,” said Ram Chandra of Manjhawli. To keep the villagers quiet, SRS Constructions, the company developing the golf course, was making roads in Manjhawli and nearby Akbarpur. “People are happy that the rates of land will go up and they will sell and leave. Who wants to do farming anyway? Once farming goes, the river will no more be a part of the social structure,” he said.

A cow’s body floated in Beduki Nala, 30 km from Manjhawli, and on the bank lied a skeleton. Some farmers have discovered benefits in using the polluted water. “When we use this water, we need less fertilizers because it comes from industries,” said Satwant Kumar of Beduki village on the Haryana-Uttar Pradesh border.

The river is indeed getting estranged from society. Until 30 years ago, Kushak village in Haryana used to have a three-day fair of Peer Sidh Baba on its banks. “In the month of Baisakh, people from all over Haryana would come here to have a dip in the river and sell their wares near her. That used to be the time of water melons and jalebis. Then the water in the river receded and the pollution went up. Now the fair has practically died down, with nobody wanting a dip in the dirty water,” said Gajraj Bainsla, sarpanch of Kushak.

Village after village accused Delhi of polluting the water. “There was a time when one dropped a coin and it could be seen on the floor of the river. Now even a human body will not be visible. All because of Delhi, which takes away all the river water for drinking and releases this dark, stinking filth for us,” said Sukhbeer Mistry of Kushak. Later in Mathura we saw a coin diver struggling with grime to get a mouthful of coins—under water, coin divers find it convenient to collect coins in the mouth.

As the villagers collected around us, our leader and convenor of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, Manoj Mishra, exhorted, “It is you all, the people of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, who have to tell Delhi to stop polluting, else you will not give them any water from upstream.”
The next day our journey entered into the religious sphere. Now we were traversing the land of Krishna. An iskcon follower among us removed his footwear for the rest of the journey. It was June 8 and we were very close to Ganga Dushehra, the day when millions of devotees take a dip in the holy river. The religious fervour was at a heightened pitch, but only at few places did it transform into cleaning of the river, like at Vishram Ghat in Mathura.

From the pontoon bridge of Shergarh in the Braj region the Yamuna presented a different sight—and smell. For the first time during the journey, it did not stink. People considered it the benevolence of Krishna. Mishra said it was the river’s self-cleansing capacity. “From Faridabad till here, there is no major town, so very little sewage has been thrown into the river,” he said. The river rejuvenated with each passing village till Vrindavan, where we halted for the night. A little before Vrindavan, 50 cusecs of water from Ganga Nahar is released into the Yamuna to improve its water quality. But at Vrindavan Kosi Nala pours its muck and garbage into it.

In the morning we took a boat ride around the ghats, most of which were 500 metres from the river, divided from it by a sand beach and a concrete road.

“It is you people who have polluted the river. All the muck that comes down here is from Delhi. Even if Rs 30 crore of the Rs 400 crore spent on the Yamuna Action Plan were utilized, the Yamuna would have been much cleaner. Everybody just shouts about cleaning it; in the evening aarti, they chant prayers of Yamuna Maiya, but nobody takes a single step,”

said our boatman Hero Hiralal, who claims never to have stepped out of Braj, summarizing my entire journey. We heard this lament often during the journey.

The Yamuna was choking on silt, garbage and debris. “The thick layer of sand and plastic under water does not let it penetrate underground. The groundwater level has gone down from 30-40 feet eight years ago to below 150 feet. Most of the environment ministry funds are for awareness. What should be the next step after awareness?” asked Neeraj Saigal of ngo Food for Life, Vrindavan. Shrivatsa Goswami, the Mahant of Jaisingh Ghera, the erstwhile haveli of Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur in Vrindavan, told us how a road was built on the flood plain to the ashram of a prominent priest and how a ring road is being planned around Vrindavan, which will involve erecting pillars on the riverbed. “A river is the image of society. If it is polluted, the society is polluted. If religion can be used for corrupt purposes, why can’t it be used for the cause of the river?” asked Goswami.

By the time it reached Mathura, the Yamuna looked feeble and tired. Gokul Barrage considerably reduced its current. Even the wells along the ghats had dried up. “The barrage was meant to improve water level in Mathura and Agra, but the level has plunged because of silt in the river,” said Gopeshwarnath Chaturvedi of Shrikrishan Janmasthan Sewa Sansthan, Mathura.

As we approached Agra, the short respite from stench was over. And the image of the city, as Goswami said, reflected in the river. Mantola Nala, the drain that passed through the heritage corridor between the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, presented the ugliest sight of the trip as it fell into the river. The foam was accompanied by waste from leather factories. And this when the sewage from the nala had just started going back to the stp after 15 days.
In violation of the Supreme Court order and the Water Act, sewage is often diverted into the river “due to old and worn out pumping stations and stps which do not work half the time”, said Ravi Singh, an environmentalist. The city administration is now contemplating bringing drinking water to the city from the Ganga through a 130 km pipeline. There goes the Yamuna Action Plan.

Though activists led us into the city in a procession, river conservation as a motive was lost somewhere along the way. During the next two days water and beverages were served to us in plastic glasses, which were thrown away on the riverbed, as were the used dry-leaf plates and plastic bowls. There was more talk and noise. Sabhas were organized to welcome the “team from Delhi” and hundreds of leaders and politicians launched into speeches. The journey, which had taken a religious turn from Shergarh, now went into the politics of an urbanized town. The wheel had turned a full circle.

The boatman’s words came back to my mind as I looked at the river, black with filth and reduced to a trickle. How it covers the rest of its journey before finally merging into the Ganga at Sangam is difficult to comprehend. Perhaps it is the divinity attached to it.

The department of personnel and training (DOPT) under the Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions has commissioned international accounting firm PriceWaterhouse Coopers the responsibility to review the RTI Act 2005. Activists say the study may end up protecting government officials. They are conducting a parallel study on how far the RTI has been able to keep up its mandate of providing timely response to “citizens requests for government information’.

Review studies
The accounting firm will review RTI implementation in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa.

“It will study whether the act has reached the grassroots or is just being used in urban areas. It will look into problems that information officers and seekers face and how the act can be streamlined better,’

said K G Verma, director RTI, DOPT.

Among the criteria for selection of the consultant was that the agency should have carried out such studies elsewhere. Although the firm has no such record, it qualified the financial and technical bids, indicating it has the means to conduct such a study. NGOs had also competed for the tender, says a dopt official. “But their concept paper was very weak and they did not seem to have enough manpower to conduct the study,’ said another dopt official.

NGOs are conducting their independent study under the banner RTI Accountability and Assessment Group, which comprises organizations such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (mkss), ncpri, Devdungri, Rajasthan, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Centre for Studies of Developing Societies, Delhi. mkss was among the organizations that spearheaded the RTI movement in the mid 1990s.

“Our study is not in response to the government’s study but it just happened to have the same timing. The objectives of both studies are similar but methodologies are different. Given the government’s track record, our suspicion is they will subtly try to weaken the act. Besides, the agency involved is an accounting firm, so we can’t be sure of how much they will be able to find out at the village level,’

Singh told Down To Earth.

Their study will cover 10 states and finish by October. A national survey of 20,000 people will be conducted where villagers will be asked to frame RTI applications on a subject and responses of public authorities concerned will be noted. Similar methodology will be followed in urban areas as well. Specific sectors such as media and institutions including high courts and the supreme court will be studied on how they have internalized RTI. Public Information officers (pios) and chief information commissioners of states will also be interviewed.

“Systemic changes in governance are happening gradually. For instance, officials are scared if they do something under political pressure, they know they are answerable to the public. The enthusiasm for the act is there and it will go up. But there are certain issues of implementation that need to be addressed,’ said Singh. Appeals top the list and are among the major deterrents for people to use RTI Act. Besides, these take time.

Only one case (of appeal) is cleared in a day in Andhra Pradesh and in Kerala, just 50 cases were disposed of in 2007, says Arvind Kejriwal of Parivartan, the ngo that used RTI to expose public distribution system scam in Delhi. “Waiting time for appeals in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh is more than three years and in Delhi, it is up to a year. Information commissioners are killing the act.

They refuse to impose penalty on pios for delaying or giving out incomplete information,’ Kejriwal said. Information officers justify the backlog saying they don’t have enough manpower or cite plain lack of incentive as one of the reasons (see box: Our complaints).

Proactive disclosure
Harinesh Pandya, who runs Janpath, an ngo in Ahmedabad that spreads awareness on RTI, says there is a fundamental problem. “Half the load of RTI   applications will go down if proactive disclosure is made properly,’ he says. Proactive disclosure under section 4 of the act lays down that public authorities have to suo motu declare information pertaining to their functioning under various factors, which include budget allocations, welfare and subsidy schemes, inter-departmental transfers, details of committees, grants, permits and concessions.

Ideally, a person need not file an RTI application for such information.

“While announcing the act in the Lok Sabha, the prime minister had said that proactive information should be provided readily so that a person needs to use RTI as less as possible. But this has not been taken in spirit by pios and hence offices are flooded with applications and appeals,’

says Pandya.

The following example is a case in point. In Jamnagar district in Gujarat, a person filed an RTI application with the labour department in 2007 asking how many inspections on local manual labour employed by Reliance Petroleum factory was carried out in the past five years. The company is supposed to employ 80 per cent local manual labour as a part of conditions for getting tax benefits. But information was denied under section 8 of the act, which says it is not mandatory to provide information relating to commercial confidence or trade secrets, the disclosure of which would harm the competitive position of a third party, unless larger public interest is involved. The seeker, Rafeek Lal Maradia, received information after he filed the second appeal. When the information was granted, the company filed a case in the Gujarat High Court saying it was third party information and that the labour commissioner had given it without the company’s permission. The court put a stay on providing third party information and told the seeker not to use the information provided. The case is pending still.

“This was proactive information which the labour department should have given even without an RTI application but now every department is using this instance for not revealing details,’ says Pandya.

Surendra Srivastava of Lok Satta, an ngo in Mumbai, agrees: “Any information that does not impact the legal personal interest of someone should not be denied to public. Disclosures on who was awarded the tender for road laying etc are denied often. It depends on the pio who feels that by the time the appeal is heard, he will either retire or get transferred,’ he said.

Proactive disclosure becomes all the more necessary because most citizens are still wary of government officers. They do not perceive getting information as their fundamental right. Janpath, along with state information commission and the Gujarat government, is doing a proactive disclosure audit of four public departments in each district of the state to find out what is lacking in their system and suggest additions in them.

Grievance redressal tool
Though there are problems, activists agree RTI is a powerful regulation and has brought in significant changes in governance. Singh says government officers are careful because they know they can be booked under the RTI act if they indulge in corrupt practices. He cites an instance where an officer refused to do the bidding of a retired secretary of his department. The secretary wanted him to allot a servant quarter but the officer did not oblige.

Ministers may have become careful about their travel bills after Maharashtra governor S M Krishna’s travel details got exposed through an RTI application. The disclosure revealed that the governor and his wife spent Rs 35 lakh on 31 trips between Mumbai and Bangalore from December 2004 to November 2006. All the trips were paid from the government exchequer. Visits included those undertaken for weddings, funerals, dance performances, a tennis association meeting and a volleyball championship. In an effort to give the regulation a boost, the Bihar government has introduced RTI applications over phone for those who cannot write. “But,’ says Singh, “the RTI Act has not been used to its potential and there is still a long way to go.’ For now, he hopes the country can wish the regulation a happy third birthday in October this year.

Researchers who carried out the study say yes. “We found one whole seed and three to four broken seeds,’ says A Pokharia of Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleoethnobotany, Lucknow. The study was carried out in Tokwa, an archaeologically important site in Mirzapur district. The seeds had heavy carbon coating. Based on radiocarbon dates of other Neolithic sites in the region, the author concluded that the seeds belonged to the 3rd-2nd century bc. The study was published in Current Science (Vol 94, No 2).

There are other studies that say that the Portuguese introduced custard apples in the East in the 16th century ad. Pokharia refutes such claims.

“The remains of custard apple have been recorded from other sites like Sanghol in Punjab during the Kushana Period (100–300 ad) and Raja-Nala ka tila in Sonbhadra district, Uttar Pradesh, in the Iron Age (740 bc).’

He cites carvings of custard apple trees on stupas built in 1st-2nd century bc in Bharhut and Mathura, also in Uttar Pradesh. “Such examples prove the fruit plant was brought here much before Columbus discovered Americas,’ he adds.

David L Lentz, a scientist at University of Cincinnati’s Department of Biological Sciences, says the claim cannot be established on the basis of just one seed. “The author found only one seed and it is not in good condition. The site too is not well dated. The custard apple seed was not directly dated. It seems the time period of the seed in question is not secure,’ he said.

Pokharia rejects another theory that the seeds may have been brought by migratory birds, saying,

“The seeds are too large to be brought by birds; only humans could have brought it. Besides, there is no evidence of migratory American birds.’

Anupama K of the French Institute in Pondicherry says more evidence is required to establish links between Asia and America.