A sewage drain is now called the Yamuna

The foul smell and the inky blackness remains with it for the next 32 km till Okhla, where the Hindon river injects it with some life. No wonder, the Najafgarh drain is called the “mother of all nallahs”. Though there are 18 more drains in Yamuna’s Delhi course but no one as deadly as this alone injects in 60 per cent of the sewage into the river.

The story of the drain is the story of the river itself.

Originally it was the Sahibi river flowing through what was once verdant forest, North West of Delhi. One tributary used to flow towards South Delhi and the other towards the North. It dried up over the years because of the loss in forest cover in its catchment area and became a drain for dumping household waste and industrial effluents.

It flows, gathering household muck and industrial waste from as far as Najafgarh, Wazirpur, Raja Garden, New Delhi and the entire West Central Delhi. There are 38 drains which flow into this large nalla. The result is by the time it reaches Yamuna, it is a small river in itself, but that of sewage. It flows in 1.028 million cusecs of sewage per day in the Yamuna.

A debate raged for years: To improve the condition of the river, they say stop the sewage from flowing into the river. But if the sewage is stopped, there would be no river, because that is what constitutes the river today.

Then, came the solution to clean the sewage. The Rs 340-crore Yamuna Action Plan was started — it involved setting up of 16 sewage treatment plants for household waste and 15 Common Effluent Treatment Plants for industries — but even as very little progress has been made, the policy-makers have realised that the alien system of treating may not be the best one. The five plants which are supposed to be functioning are far from producing desired results. In some, even though the plants are in place the sewer lines leading from colonies and industrial areas are not installed, like in Kondli and Rithala plants. In some cases, the inflow is so high that it renders the entire operation futile, like in the Keshavpuram sewage treatment plant.

In summer, the whole operation is reduced to a farce as these plants do not have an alternate power arrangement. “The bacteria which is used to clean the sewage gets spoilt and it takes months for it to normalise,” said an official at the Okhla sewage treatment plant.

In any case, the plants aim at only treating the water till the secondary stage. The result is the Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) of the river is 30 instead of the permissible five.

Though Yamuna is only a shade better than the Najafgarh drain, but at this rate the story of the drain and the nallah will be the same. There will be no water, only an outlet for sewage.