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March that started from Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh on 1 March is expected to enter Delhi on Monday
12 March 2013, Livemint & Wall Street Journal, New Delhi: A group of up to 15,000 farmers, religious leaders, their followers and activists has reached the border of Delhi, demanding a clean Yamuna river.
The march started from Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh on 1 March and is expected to enter Delhi on Monday, disrupting traffic as the protesters head toward the capital’s centre.
“When Yamuna reaches Haryana (that neighbours Delhi), after its source in Yamunotri, Uttarakhand, most of its water is taken away by the state to meet its needs,” said Goswami Pankaj, a religious leader from Vrindavan who’s on the march with his followers. “One of the demands that we have from the government is that more water should be released from Hathnikund barrage, located in Haryana, where the state extracts almost 87% of the river’s flow, thereby leaving hardly any fresh water in the river.”
“Our second demand is that Delhi should not be releasing any of its wastewater in the river, treated or untreated, because then what reaches Mathura and Vrindavan is pure sewage,” said Pankaj.
The Uttar Pradesh and Delhi governments in October informed the Supreme Court that they together had spent Rs.4,439 crore over the past 18 years to make water in the Yamuna river potable.
Yet the quality of water that farmers in Mathura and Vrindavan get for irrigation is dismal, said Bhanu Pratap Singh, president of Bhartiya Kisan Union, an organisation of more than 100,000 farmers. “Farmers need fresh water for irrigation of their crops, but what they get instead is the water from Delhi’s toilets and industries. All farmers on the banks of the Yamuna river are using water which is highly polluted and also poisonous.”
Chandrabhan Arya, a farmer from a village in Mathura, said farmers in his area are developing health problems because they use polluted Yamuna water to irrigate their fields. “But people in the rest of the country also need to wake up because they are also eating grain, vegetables and fruits which have been irrigated by this dirty water,” Arya said.
“Delhi Police is very concerned about the traffic problems that will occur when around 15-20,000 people enter the city from the Badarpur border,” said a police official in neighbouring Faridabad, requesting anonymity. The official said Delhi police commissioner Neeraj Kumar had visited the march site in Faridabad and was trying to divert the crowd away from Delhi.
Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said he did not want to comment on the issue.
Sunil Singh, of Yamuna Raksha Dal, a non-profit, was positive about entering Delhi on Monday. “We have had a meeting with various deputy commissioners of police from Delhi at their headquarters and although they have said that Delhi cannot accommodate our tractors, but all the people will be going to the capital for sure,” he said.
The protesters are undecided on a venue yet but plan to stay in the capital till their demands are met, said Singh.
In a related development, lawmakers from the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) staged a protest in the capital on Sunday to criticize the Congress-led Delhi government for ignoring the Yamuna issue.
Ravi Monga, of the Save Yamuna campaign, said Sushma Swaraj, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, will raise the issue of Yamuna pollution in Parliament on Monday.
Shrikant Sharma, national media convener, BJP, confirmed that a delegation of the group had met party president Rajnath Singh and Sushma Swaraj on Friday. “We had promised them that we will raise the Yamuna issue in both the houses on Monday,” he said over the phone.
source:
12 March 2013, Livemint & Wall Street Journal
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