Rivers & Water Bodies | Water supply, consumption and pollution in cities

How people power reclaimed the Vishwamitri for Vadodara

From building a coalition against the Vishwamitri Riverfront Development Project to getting it scrapped – a rare success – people’s movements have interwoven passionate activism with law, science, and data. Their collective engagement and dogged sense of purpose made all…

‘The greatest threat to wetlands is, ironically,
government agencies’

In a landmark order in December 2024,[1] the Supreme Court directed every state to appoint its Wetland Authority, complete ground truthing, and…

Focused on flood management, Mumbai lets down Mithi River ecologically

Twenty years after the July 2005 deluge in Mumbai, the Mithi, pivotal to drain the rain, is still choked, silted and disconnected…

Why Kolkata should be a celebration of the Hooghly but isn’t

The iconic river, immortalised in cinema, songs and art, hardly has a happy relationship with the city. Visible for barely 1.5 kilometres,…

Rivers are our home (but) what will the waters remember – plastic?

“The Mithi,” wrote the legendary poet Eunice D’souza, “will carry you on a raft of garbage to a dying sea.” As rivers…

‘Save the Yamuna floodplains from government-sponsored encroachment’

The Yamuna is being choked, artificial grass is being watered with ground water, ornamental plants and bamboo trees planted, the riverbank has…

‘Give the river back its space. Give it a new spatial
role in a city’

São Paulo and Mumbai are similar in that the cities have seen massive urbanisation at the cost of rivers. The Tietê and…

Why cities must reconnect with their rivers, renew river-people relationship

Rivers are slowly being erased from people’s lives and imagination in cities. Seen as water sources, as dumping yards for waste, and their floodplains as developable land, they remain disconnected from the rhythms of urban life. Rivers are, can be,…

Vrishabhavathi: A river’s struggle in Bengaluru’s landscape

Our imagination of rivers often contrasts with what we see in our cities. They are integrated into urban systems as stormwater drains,…

To rekindle Delhi’s relationship with the Yamuna, clean it up

The Yamuna has been Delhi’s lifeline for centuries but the city now has a severed, mostly utilitarian, relationship with it. Only two…