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India Wants to Spend Rs 19,300 Crore on Rejuvenating Yamuna and 12 Other Rivers Through Plantations

Mayank Aggarwal

The Union government is planning an ambitious programme for the rejuvenation of 13 major Indian rivers through forestry interventions at a cost of nearly Rs 19,300 crore. The plan, however, experts say, is yet another way of packaging the concept of afforestation and it fails to address the real issues behind the dying rivers.

The detailed project reports on the rejuvenation of 13 major rivers – Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, Sutlej, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, Luni, Narmada, Godavari, Mahanadi, Krishna and Cauvery – were recently released by the Indian government’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav. The reports, funded by the National Afforestation & Eco-development Board of the environment ministry, were prepared by the Dehradun-based Indian Council of Forestry Research & Education.

The 13 rivers across the country, mainly in the Himalayan and peninsular region, collectively cover a total basin area of 18,90,110 square kilometres which is 57.45% of the geographical area of the country. The government states that the growing water crisis on account of depleting freshwater resources, especially due to the shrinking and degradation of river ecosystems is a major impediment to achieving national goals pertaining to the environment, conservation, climate change, and sustainable development.

Issues impacting rivers

The detailed project reports said deforestation and forest degradation, scanty rainfall, flash floods, landslides, bank erosion, faulty agriculture and horticulture practices, soil erosion, excessive groundwater extraction, rapid urbanisation, unregulated floodplain, waste dumping, the release of effluents, unregulated tourism, pilgrimage, unregulated sand mining and riverbank encroachment are some of the issues that are impacting the rivers in the country.

The reports outline various treatment models for natural, agriculture and urban landscape in each of the delineated riverscapes. In natural landscapes, the detailed project reports propose activities such as afforestation, soil and moisture conservation structures, grassland and pasture development, cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants, management of invasive and alien species, forest fires while in agricultural landscapes it proposes agroforestry (bund and block plantations), high-density plantations, fodder plantations and plantation of fruit trees. In the urban landscapes, meanwhile, they call for riverfront development, eco-park development, industrial and educational estate plantations, and avenue plantations.

The reports noted that soil and moisture conservation measures will precede the plantation activities wherein indigenous species will be preferred. The programme proposes a total of “667 treatment and plantation models” for the proposed forestry interventions and supporting activities, in different landscapes.

As to why forestry interventions could help river rejuvenation, the detailed project reports note that forest and river ecosystems are inter-connected and forests absorb rainfall, leads to slow runoff, regulate the hydrological cycle, reduce soil erosion, improve water infiltration rate and recharge aquifers.

The programme is expected to be executed through the state forest departments as nodal department and with the convergence of schemes of other line departments in the states towards the activities proposed in the detailed project reports and funding support from the government of India. The plan is proposed to be spread over a period of five years with a provision for additional time for the maintenance of plantations.

Flawed approach

Sharachchandra Lele, a distinguished fellow at the Centre for Environment and Development, ATREE, told Mongabay-India that the “plan in this document is mostly about planting trees in catchment areas, along river banks and along farm boundaries, some lantana removal from degraded forests, and a small component of soil and conservation measures”.

“This is just the old wine of afforestation in a new bottle,” said Lele, who carries out research on ecological, and technological issues in forests, energy and water resource management among things. “Moreover, this is a top-down approach that even usurps the powers of the states. It is a flawed and undemocratic approach … As per the Forest Rights Act 2006, the power to decide what happens on their landscapes belongs to the communities. What makes this proposal completely unscientific is that all this has nothing to do with river rejuvenation, the supposed raison d’etre for this document.”

“The rivers are dead, dying, or degraded because they are being killed first by big dams and then many smaller dams that cut off environmental flows, industrial and domestic pollution, and climate change-led glacier meltdown and extreme weather events,” he said. “Planting more trees is not going to help address these issues. We cannot just push plantations as a solution for anything and everything.”

Can plantations help?

According to the government, the activities proposed in the detailed project reports shall help achieve potential benefits of increasing the green cover, containing soil erosion, recharging water table and sequestering carbon dioxide in addition to benefits in the form of non-timber forest produce.

The detailed project reports highlight that the projected increase in the forest cover after the programme could be about 7,417.36 sq km along with estimated additional carbon-dioxide sequestration to the tune of 50.21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent after 10 years and 74.76 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent after 20 years.

They also claim that the programme would lead to about 1,889.89 million cubic metres of groundwater recharge every year, sedimentation reduction of about 64,83,114 cubic metres every year, non-timber and other forest produce of about Rs 449.01 crores.

The government noted that this will play an important role in India achieving the international climate commitments such as the creation of an additional carbon sink of 2.5 dillion–3 billion tons of tonnes equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030 made just before the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, restoration of 26 million hectares of degraded lands by 2030 as a land degradation neutrality target under United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and halting the biodiversity loss by 2030 under Convention on Biological Diversity and Sustainable Development Goals.

The government also claimed that a “timely and effective implementation of the proposed forestry interventions” is expected to significantly contribute towards the “improvement of terrestrial and aquatic biota, and livelihoods besides rejuvenation of the rivers”.

However, Manshi Asher, a researcher with the Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective, an advocacy and research group working on issues of environmental justice and forest rights in the Himalayan region, said, “It seems like there will be the same old mindless plantations that will not survive, riverfront beautification which will concretise natural landscapes, tampering with grassland ecosystems and threat to locals dependent on floodplains for farming, grazing.”

“Really rejuvenating rivers would require tackling industrial pollution, sand mining, stopping mindless dam construction, and protection of existing forest ecosystems in the catchments,” Asher told Mongabay-India. “In the case of Himachal and in the upper Sutlej basin we have found how afforestation done through CAMPA [Compensatory Afforestation Act] has failed and is, in fact, impacting the natural composition of landscapes.”

“The absence of appropriate sites and space for plantations is a problem,” Asher told Mongabay-India. “Plantations through the eco task force and JFMCs [Joint Forest Management Committees] will also threaten communities’ customary land and forest rights and violate provisions of the Forest Rights Act 2006.”

Lele added, “The solutions lie elsewhere: in stopping dam building, regulating effluents, controlling groundwater depletion that immediately affects the base flows in rivers.”

“We need to discuss how to balance human uses and their impacts on river flows, catchment areas and flood plains, all of which have expanded dramatically as our society grew and industrialised,” Lele said.

(Courtesy: Mongabay, a nonprofit environmental science and conservation news platform.)

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Ganga Still Suffers – But Govt Thinks ‘Successful’ Rejuvenation Is a Blueprint for Other Rivers

Aathira Perinchery

On March 14, the Union environment ministry unveiled a plan to rejuvenate 13 major rivers in India using “forestry interventions”. A major thrust of the plan is to afforest river banks; others include “riverfront development” and installing “eco parks”.

The government has selected Himalayan, peninsular and inland rivers in 24 states and two Union territories, including Jhelum, Yamuna, Cauvery, Krishna and Luni, for this programme, with a total outlay of around Rs 19,300 crore.

According to the ministry, the project is based on the “successful implementation” of a pilot afforestation programme in 2015 as part of the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) – a Central scheme to rejuvenate the ailing Ganga river.

However, experts said they are not convinced for two reasons. There’s no proof the NMCG-funded project succeeded, and the new promises could further deteriorate the rivers, they said.

Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav and state ministers released the detailed project reports (DPRs) to rejuvenate 13 major rivers: Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, Sutlej, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, Luni, Narmada, Godavari, Mahanadi, Krishna and Cauvery. These rivers together run for 42,830 km and drain more than half of India’s geographical area.

The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) prepared the detailed project reports with funds from the National Afforestation and Eco-development Board under the environment ministry.

The rationale to use “forestry interventions” to rejuvenate the rivers is that riverbank afforestation will recharge groundwater and ensure perennial flow. The project proposes to use different plantation “models” for different landscapes – natural, agricultural and urban – that the rivers pass through.

These models also propose to include a combination of distributing saplings to farmers, planting fruit- and timber-producing trees, constructing staggered contour trenches for soil and water conservation, promoting ecotourism, and so on.

By doing this, an overview document that the ministers released claims the project will increase forest cover, carbon sequestration and groundwater recharging; reduce sedimentation; and create jobs.

So the Union government is yoking the project’s outcomes to India’s international commitments under the Paris Agreement, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and the Sustainable Development Goals.

An immediate implication is that if this river rejuvenation project doesn’t succeed, India’s climate commitments could be in danger.

‘Priorities need changing’

The preamble of the overview document is “welcome” for its talk of forests and rivers being complex systems. And planting medicinal plants and other vegetation that hold economic value for people could be a good way to ensure political will and local stakes. But there are “some issues” and certain “priorities” that will have to be changed, ecohydrologist Jagdish Krishnaswamy, dean of the school of environment and sustainability at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, said.

One is that planting plants and trees along riverbanks alone won’t restore rivers, according to him.

Indeed, this topic of discussion emerged when Jaggi Vasudev and his Isha Foundation launched a project in 2017 called “Rally for Rivers”. Its prime proposal was to raise funds to plant trees on the banks of rivers for 20,000 km, based on the idea that afforestation along river banks would recharge the groundwater table and ensure flowing rivers. But ecologists had pointed out that trees don’t necessarily make rivers flow.

Instead, restoring river flow would be the first step to revive rivers, Krishnaswamy told The Wire Science. Our rivers are “in trouble” because of upstream regulation and water management, such as dams, and extraction.

“Unless we make changes in the amount of water we use for agriculture, industries and cities, we won’t be able to retain or enhance flow in our rivers,” he said. “Our groundwater extraction is so high that it has reduced the dry season flow in many rivers, especially peninsular ones.”

We also need to take climate change into account while planning such “large vegetative treatments,” he added. These investments must be resilient to ongoing and future climate change.

For example, many rivers sport enormous old-growth trees, such as mango, jamun and ficus, along their banks and in the riparian zone. No amount of planting new trees will be able to replace the ecological functions that such old trees provide. Therefore they should be retained, Krishnaswamy explained.

‘Success’ with the Ganga

Afforestation along the Ganga has succeeded – this claim underlies the new afforestation-oriented project to rejuvenate other Indian rivers, according to the ICFRE document. Is this true?

According to the report, in 2015, the Indian government launched a pilot afforestation project along the banks of the Ganga. This refers to a project funded by NMCG that the state forest departments of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal have been implementing since 2016, according to the mission website. The total allocation was Rs 2,293 crore.

But after almost five years, environmental activist Manoj Misra, head of the ‘Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan’ organisation, told The Wire Science that there is no sign it succeeded.

“This is clear from so many perspectives, including the state of the Ganga’s tributaries, continued release of mostly untreated industrial and urban effluents, and so on,” Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, also said. “To use it as an example of a success story for other rivers is out of the question.”

As The Wire Science reported in December 2021:

“… it is one of the most polluted rivers on the planet. Researchers estimated in 2018 that the Ganga was one of the ten river systems in the world that carried 93% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean from rivers alone.

“The river’s biggest problem is untreated sewage. One study reported that the prime cause of its deteriorating water quality was untreated sewage from urban areas. Another … found that untreated sewage accounted for 75% of its filth. … Barrages and hydroelectric projects [also] divert more than half the water away, reducing flow in the river’s main stem and concentrating pollutants.”

Misra, in fact, called the Ganga’s rejuvenation a “myth”. According to him, it isn’t possible to “rejuvenate rivers with … engineering concepts” that have fixed deadlines. Instead, such an “ecological challenge” ought to be tackled as a “mission”, not over “five or 10 years” but in a more open-ended fashion.

Because rivers are often combinations of multiple streams by the time they drain into a sea, reviving them will have to mean reviving all of those streams. The new proposed project doesn’t offer to do this.

Third, rejuvenation will need to be encouraged and led by local stakeholders and institutions, and not a project-implementing government department, Misra added.

Double standards and destruction

There is still room to argue that the new project could succeed where the NMCG has failed, but India’s ‘riverfront development’ efforts so far haven’t been successful either.

Thakkar said the cases of the Ganga and the Sabarmati “don’t inspire confidence”.

In 2019, The Wire found that a joint investigation by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board and the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti held riverfront development to be responsible for the river’s current “drought-like condition”. Their report read that the river’s concretised banks had played havoc with groundwater recharge and forced it to depend on water from the Narmada to maintain its hydro-ecological character.

Indeed, when restoring rivers – especially in urban stretches – the riverfront should retain its ecological characteristics and shouldn’t be concretised or channelised, as in the examples of riverfront development thus far, Krishnaswamy said.

Misra, in fact, called ‘riverfront development’ and “eco parks” “fancy terms and fancy ideas which have nothing to do with river rejuvenation per se”. According to him, “The Sabarmati example is the worst possible model for any river rejuvenation exercise.”

And even as the government talks of rejuvenating rivers on the one hand, Thakkar added, it continues to promote projects that destroy rivers on the other. The government is “working at complete cross purposes with what they are saying”.

The most recent example of such a contradiction could be the Ken-Betwa river-interlinking project. For the project, the Indian government is to fell 2.3 million trees and submerge around 9,000 hectares of land, including a part of the Panna Tiger Reserve. Thakkar said these forests together constitute an important “hydrological asset” because it is the catchment area of the Ken river.

“The Ken is one of the most pristine tributaries in the Ganga-Yamuna basins,” Thakkar said. “In the context of the document they have come out with, where they talk of river rejuvenation through afforestation, … why are [the Ken catchment] forests not seen as a hydrological asset in governance?”

Don’t just plant trees

Planting trees alone along river banks can deplete water too, Krishnaswamy said. In 2017 when the “Rally for Rivers” project prompted discussion on this, Krishnaswamy had said that “70%” of the time, increasing tree cover on riverbanks could in fact decrease streamflow – including in the dry season.

Ensuring a mix of trees, grasses and shrubs in “appropriate densities” and species composition – compatible with the flow regime of the river and the area’s climate – will be crucial to ensure tree-planting itself doesn’t deplete water, Krishnaswamy said.

Planting trees – even native species – on riverbanks can displace existing vegetation, such as sparse scrub forests, grasslands, reeds and shrubs. These important riparian plants support many species. Along the Cauvery, for example, smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata), a vulnerable species to which the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 reserves a high level of protection, live among such plants.

“For the smooth-coated otters found in the plains, shrubby growth, reeds and grasses along the river’s edge are critical for denning and as sites of refuge,” Nisarg Prakash, an ecologist who studies the species along the Cauvery, told The Wire Science.

“Any disturbance to the existing riverside vegetation can have a detrimental impact on these populations of smooth-coated otters, which have managed to survive in these vastly modified riverscapes.”

Unfortunately, the new project’s overview document describes “Rally for Rivers” as a “priority conservation programme” initiated in India in the last three decades. It also states that the ICFRE, which prepared the project reports for the 13 rivers, consulted the Isha Foundation in the process.

“At the outset, we have an issue with the whole process of such planning, where something is carried out behind closed doors or with highly restricted and selected consultations – and then all of a sudden a document is released with grand aims and objectives claiming to work for the rejuvenation of rivers,” Misra said.

“It is a totally unacceptable method and huge amounts of public funds should never be invested in such cavalier fashion, with results that no one ever comes to know.”

“There is currently no body to govern the very complex entity that a river is,” Thakkar said. He suggested we need one to monitor the state of India’s rivers and another to coordinate its management.

“These are among the bare minimum initial few steps to take to truly rejuvenate our rivers.”

(Courtesy: The Wire.)