Clean Yamuna march reaches Capital

Senior officials also confirmed that a delegation from the Yamuna Rakshak Dal met Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan and Water Resources Minister Harish Rawat in a meeting that lasted several hours on Monday night. The main issue,mentioned in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,asking for “adequate fresh natural water to be released from Hathini Kund barrage to allow ecological flow of water in the stretch from Hathini Kund to Allahabad”.

Officials said the meeting remained inconclusive and another discussion would follow on Tuesday.

Immediately after the group entered Delhi,BJP leaders Vijay Goel and Vijender Gupta arrived and addressed the crowd,and assured them that the issue of the health of the Yamuna would be raised in the Delhi Assembly. “Yamuna is critical and nothing has been done by either the state or the central government for several years. We will raise this issue both in Parliament and the Assembly,and support this movement,” Vijay Goel said.

Sunil Kumar,secretary of the Yamuna Rakshak Dal,said,“The state of the Yamuna is a concern for lakhs of people. The government has turned a blind eye to the health of the Yamuna,and the situation required a rally of this scale. A majority of those who have walked so many kilometres are devotees of Lord Krishna,who bathe in the river at Braj. They still treat the water,which is full of industrial effluent from the Shahdara drain and factories in Delhi,as holy and take a dip in the river. This is the cause for a variety of health problems. Reports show that there is not a drop of fresh water in the Yamuna any longer. Irrigation is affected in a large part of Northern India due to the polluted water.”

Other demands set out by the protesters include,“no inflow of sewage into the Yamuna river bed”,and the “construction of a parallel sewerage canal along the Delhi stretch to carry treated waste water to Okhla for irrigation purpose if necessary”.