On a Sunday morning earlier this month, around 800 citizens of Pune gathered in the locality of Baner. The group walked along the Mula river for around 20 minutes, before settling down in a grove where it merged with the Ramnadi river.
There, the Punekars recited poems and slogans in protest against the Pune riverfront project, a draft plan for which was prepared by the Pune Municipal Corporation in 2017. Not far from where they were, bulldozers had been at work, laying down mud to prepare for construction.
For the riverfront project, the corporation will build embankments along a 44-km stretch of the Mula, also known as Mula-Mutha after it merges with the Mutha river in Pune, with the stated objective of reducing the risk of flooding and reducing the river’s pollution.
About 1,300 km away in New Delhi, too, a riverfront project came into focus recently.
The Delhi Development Authority has been planning a similar riverfront along the Yamuna for many years, with the stated aim of improving the quality of the water and creating recreational zones such as parks for the public.
The plan took some shape in 2010, but then saw years of slow progress – the project regained attention in February when the Bharatiya Janata Party upon winning the Delhi election announced that one of its priorities would be to revamp the Yamuna riverfront.
Riverfront projects have gained popularity across cities in the last two decades. Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati riverfront, whose construction began in 2005 and parts of which began to be opened to the public in 2012, has emerged as a model for other riverfronts across the country. Today, Rajasthan’s Kota hosts the “world’s first heritage riverfront” along the Chambal river, while Patna is preparing to turn its riverfront into a cultural and religious hub. In Hyderabad, the Musi riverfront is set to house the world’s tallest statue of Mohandas Gandhi and a London Eye-like attraction.
But experts and citizens are concerned that these projects fail to meet their objectives of mitigating floods and rejuvenating rivers, and in fact indicate misplaced priorities. “The authorities are focusing on the construction along the river, and channelling it to make it look beautiful with parks,” said Priyanvada Gambhir, a retired school teacher who attended the Pune protest. “In the meanwhile, we only have nine functioning sewage treatment plants.”
The nine plants treat about 600 million litres a day of sewage of the total 930 mld that Pune generates before it flows into the river. “We need more, and this should be prioritised,” Gambhir said.
Experts said that most riverfronts in India appear to be modelled on the Sabarmati riverfront, with features such as walkways along the river and walls and embankments designed to contain the river.
This approach, they argue, ignores unique characteristics of different rivers’ ecologies. Neha Sarwate, an environmental planner and assistant professor at Vadodara’s Maharaja Sayajirao University, explained that it was crucial to study the river basin where a riverfront is to be built.
For instance, she noted, Pune is in the upper basin of the Mula-Mutha river, while Ahmedabad is in the middle basin of the Sabarmati river. These locations determine how much water and sediment the rivers carry, the velocity of floodwaters during monsoons and the species of wildlife that thrive in the area – these features should ideally inform the riverfronts’ designs, she observed.
“The morphology of rivers is different,” said Sarwate. “You cannot apply the same formula from one city to another.”
Concretising a river
Most riverfront development projects across cities involve construction along the river banks or the floodplains. The structures that are built can include embankments along the river to mitigate floods, ghats for religious purposes, and pathways and public parks for recreation.
This heavy focus on construction along the river is harmful to the river ecology, experts say. For instance, building an embankment or wall along the river requires constructing foundation structures between 30 and 40 feet underground along the river bank, which could disrupt the flow of water from and into aquifers, or layers of rock and sediment underground that hold water.
“With this construction, the aquifer gets disconnected with the river,” said Sarang Yadwadkar, an activist who is associated with the citizen group Pune River Revival.
Yadwadkar explained that aquifers perform two key functions. First, they recharge groundwater by absorbing water that comes in through rainfall or from the riverbed. Second, they discharge water into surface bodies, such as springs and streams.
Both these functions keep rivers and other waterbodies healthy, Yadwadkar explained.
Moreover, such construction constricts the width of the river, which can result in more severe floods.
A three-member committee set up by the National Green Tribunal in 2013 took note of this problem while hearing a public-interest litigation about the pollution of the Yamuna. The committee was tasked with examining problems related to the dumping of debris along Yamuna, and analysing the proposed riverfront development scheme in Delhi.
In its report, the committee noted that “the proposed activities such as construction of various recreational and public facilities by effecting topographic changes will reduce the flood carrying capacity and aggravate flooding”. It reasoned that this would occur because the floodplain where the riverfront is planned “is an active floodplain which is frequently flooded by medium floods”.
Since the floodplain is a natural space for the river to expand to during heavy rains, restricting it would cause the river to rise and flood into the city, the committee stated. It suggested that the riverfront plan “is untenable and should be stopped”.
Instead, the committee recommended, the riverfront plan “should be replaced by a plan for restoration of the river and its floodplain”.
No focus on treating the water
Experts also point out that riverfront projects typically focus only on beautification of rivers and construction along them, rather than on restoring the quality of the rivers.
This is evident from the breakdown of costs for the Pune riverfront project, as Yadwadkar pointed out in an article. Of the total Rs 2,600 crore budgeted for the project, almost 50% has been allocated for “river edge protection”, which includes embankments, while another 26% is allocated to promenades, ghats and urban infrastructure. Only 14% of the budget has been allocated for improving the area’s sewerage network and for replenishing the river’s water.
In Delhi, too, there has been limited focus on the rejuvenation of the Yamuna. A January report of the Delhi government shows that water from only 16 of the total 36 sewage treatment plants in Delhi, or less than half, is complying with the prescribed limits of Biochemical Oxygen Demand, or BOD, which measures how much oxygen is needed to break down organic matter in water – the higher the sewage content, the higher the BOD. These sewage treatment plants are located along Delhi’s drainage network, which eventually lead into the Yamuna.
Meanwhile, the Delhi Development Authority has developed parks and ghats along the river – three of the ten project sites that DDA had planned under this project across Delhi have been completed.
Experience from existing riverfronts shows that restricting and disrupting the natural flows of rivers also harms their ecology.
The Sabarmati river, for instance, continues to be heavily polluted, and experts say the problem is intensifying because of the riverfront. In 2019, testing of its water jointly by the civil society organisation Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board showed that water just downstream of the Sabarmati riverfront had four times more Chemical Oxygen Demand than the prescribed limit. The value is a measure of the amount of oxygen that must be present to oxidise chemical compounds – thus, the higher the COD, the more polluted a river. The samples also showed that the BOD at the same site was 14 times more than the prescribed limit.
Sarwate noted that a part of the reason for such high pollution levels levels was that water flow in the river in the area is intentionally kept somewhat stagnant for the riverfront – she explained that while water from the Narmada is channeled into the riverfront, it is stopped downstream at Vasna Barrage to ensure that the water level at the riverfront remains high.
“The river has been converted into a glorified swimming pool,” she said.
With the flow of the river downstream reduced, untreated water that enters the river does not get diluted. “Because the environmental flow of the Sabarmati has been disrupted with the riverfront, the quality of water has degraded,” Sarwate said.
The riverfront project in Lucknow along Gomti river too has harmed its ecology, studies have concluded.
A 2019 study by researchers from Ambedkar University found that the project restricted the width of the floodplain of the river to 240 metres, from its original width of 450 metres. When they studied other, undisturbed, segments of the river, they found eight different habitat types for fish and other aquatic creatures to live in, and spawn – these included deep pools, wetlands, and confluences of channels. In sections along the river front that had been channelised, however, they found only two such habitats.
Creating public access by eviction
Though riverfronts are supposedly developed with the objective of creating equitable public spaces, experts often raise the question of whether their construction is, in fact, equitable. They also criticise the fact that once they are built, they are not always accessible to all.
For the development of the Yamuna riverfront, at least 200 houses were demolished in 2022 and 2023, as a report by the Housing and Land Rights Network showed. These were families that not just lived on the flood plain but also used it for agriculture, nurseries and fishing.
In many sites across Delhi, farmer communities have been practicing agriculture along the floodplains since pre-Independence times. However, the project does not have plans to include them, as a response to a Right-to-Information request by the Delhi-based People’s Resource Centre showed. “There is no proposal to include farmers in the Restoration and Rejuvenation of River Yamuna floodplains project,” the DDA said in its reply.
Similar incidents have occurred across other riverfront projects. For Hyderabad’s Musi riverfront, revenue officials razed huts of about 100 families, while the Sabarmati riverfront was constructed after more than 11,000 houses were demolished over the years.
In some cases, riverfronts have become exclusive spaces after construction. “The Chambal river front in Kota has a paid entry,” said Rajendra Ravi, founding member of the People’s Resource Centre. “Events are managed here upon payment, and boat rides are very expensive.” Such barriers transform what should have been commonly accessible spaces into “gated” ones, Ravi said. At the same time, the heavy presence of security guards serves as a kind of “monitoring system”, he added.
As construction for the riverfront continues in Pune, citizens are worried that a similar fate awaits their river. “Yes, it will look beautiful from afar when it is completed, but it is against the natural flow of the river,” said Gambhir. “All these parks and playgrounds they plan, we can have them in the rest of the city.”
The city corporation needed to direct its efforts towards reviving the river’s water quality, she argued. As far as the ecology of the floodplain and the flow of the river is concerned, she added, the corporation “should let it be as it is”.
