Artists want Delhi residents to love stinking river
10 Jan 2007 09:27:07 GMT Source: Reuters
(Repeats story to more subscribers with no changes) NEW DELHI, Jan 9 (Reuters Life!) - It's difficult to love anything that gets filled with 900 million gallons (3,000 million litres) of sewage every day. Still, two Indian artists think it worth trying to stoke some affection in New Delhi for the Yamuna, the river that meanders noxiously through the Indian capital, a stinking reminder of the strain on resources in the country of one billion people. "The reason why the city is here is because the river is here," said photographer Ravi Agarwal. The fabled ancient city of Indraprastha is said to have been founded on the bank of the Yamuna in what is now modern-day New Delhi. The river, which flows from its Himalayan source to join the Ganges at Allahabad 1,400 km (900 miles) downstream, is an object of worship for Hindus. But for most of the city's 14 million people it is simply the best place to dump their waste, including vast quantities of raw sewage from the city's numerous unplumbed slum neighbourhoods. The level of faecal coliform -- a bacteria found in animal and human faeces -- in the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna was found to be as much as 400,000 times the safe limit for bathing, according to government figures from 2004. But to remind people how nice the river could be, the artists took reporters on Tuesday upstream to Wazirabad on the city's outskirts, where the water is still fairly clean. "Everyone has written the Yamuna off, and they don't want to engage with it," said Atul Bhalla, a multimedia artist. He thinks if people joined him on his frequent picnics in the marshy fields that fill the floodplains here they would change their mind, and do more to see the river revived. The Yamuna is on the Delhi government's long list of things to be cleaned up in time for the city to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. But Agarwal has his doubts. Unlike the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris, he said "the Yamuna will never be a fundamental artery of the city."
