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Title:Living Rivers, Dying Rivers

EDITOR: Ramaswamy R Iyer

PP: 476

PRICE:₹995

Publisher:Oxford University Press

At a time when one of the biggest public supported campaigns for saving Indian rivers has been kicked off in September by a non-environmentalist (a modern yogi and a visionary) Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudeva, I had just put down reading this wonderfully done book on Indian rivers.
Frankly speaking, I had not read such an exhaustive book dealing with different rivers before this. There have been sundry accounts of rivers, swanky coffee table books on one particular river like Ganga or Brahmaputra, but dealing with more than 20-25 major rivers across India in one book is perhaps a first attempt. There are number of issues being faced by river systems in India which have been technically explained in it, adding to the immense value of the book.What is unique about this book is the set of well researched articles written by people ranging from forest officers to IIT

graduates and NGO heads to qualified hydrologists who have been studying river’s life and it’s science for decades.
The book’s editor Ramaswamy Iyer (he passed away last year) was secretary of the Water Resources Ministry in Government of India and as such, a river veteran who also had authored India’s first Water Policy in 1987.
Well, Indian rivers are facing extinction. A systematic killing of the rivers has been going on for over decades and its worst impact is being seen now when river after river is giving way to sprawling cities and dams. Soon the relationship between a ‘river’ and its water will be part of a fable. Such is the hopeless situation. Yamuna is a case in point so also the now vanished Saraswati river, which a generation before us at least knew about. Like the Saraswati, many other small rivers all across the country are running dry or have just disappeared, thanks to the incessant increase in population and associated problems.Experts like Ravi Chopra, Vinod Tare, Rama Rauta, Kalyan Rudra, Manoj Misra, Brij Gopal and Himanshu Thakkar have extensively written about different aspects of the Ganga, Yamuna, Cauvery, Narmada, Mahanadi, Godavari and the Indus, among others.
Three years ago many river experts had assembled in New Delhi and had deliberated on the state of the rivers and were struggling to come up with a definition of a river. This book provides one, based on that Delhi declaration: A river is more than a channel carrying water; it is also a transporter of sediment; it is also the catchment, the river bed, the banks, the vegetation on both sides, and the floodplain. The totality of these constitutes a river. A river harbours and interacts with innumerable organisms ( plant, animals and microbes). It is a natural, living, organic whole, a hydrological and ecological system.

Why did the need to define a river arise? It’s because conservation becomes easier in the days of legal fights. The book has a chapter, Killing a River, in which author Kelly D Alley, an American professor of anthropology, talks of ill-conceived hydropower projects and its dams which gather lots of muck and does other things which bring a river under stress and its river system is ruined to a level where the river ultimately dies.
Author after author has taken up health aspects of different rivers and have dissected them.
While Yamuna and Ganga are fighting threats to their very survival, small time rivers like Shastri in Maharashtra, and Tamraparni in Tamil Nadu are also said to be under threat. Two rivers--Aghanashini and Bedthi in the ecologically threatened Western Ghats in Karnataka have been saved by people’s action, ‘but perhaps for the time being’ , says the editor in his introduction.
Yamuna’s plight has been described by two experts Brij Gopal and Manoj Misra and both wonder if the cities which sprung up on the banks of Yamuna such as Delhi, Agra and Mathura, would survive if their lifeline river does not? Vinod Tare, the IIT consortium head for preparing the Ganga River Basin Management Plan (GRBMP), has spoken about the Nirmal Dhara, the promise the Modi Government made to the country in 2014.
Other authors have taken up rivers like Narmada, relatively less polluted, and Tapi, Mahi and Sabarmati. Himanshu Thakkar, an IIT graduate who heads SANDRP, writes about Gujarat to say that Gujarat is third largest dambuilding state in India. He reminds us of the worst dam disaster of 1979 when Morbi dam burst killing many.