The Delhi government on Wednesday approved the deployment of 32 new high-capacity cleaning machines, including two multipurpose dredgers from Finland, to counter the pollution of the river Yamuna.
Delhi’s Yamuna has long suffered from high levels of untreated sewage and chemical waste contributing to poor water quality and environmental degradation. Cleaning the Yamunahas been a recurring promise in manifestos of different parties over multiple election cycles, underscoring large public sentiment behind the issue.
The approval of these machines comes as a part of Rekha Guptaled Delhi government’s plan to actualise some of the broader pollution reduction promises made by BJPahead of the recent Delhi elections.
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Timeline of the move
Ahead of the 2025 Delhi Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised to clean Yamuna within three years. The party’s manifesto also included pledges to create a dedicated “Yamuna Kosh” for riverfront development placing river revitalisation at the centre of its environmental agenda.
As per the official statement given by the Irrigation and Flood Control Minister Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma, the drive is expected to begin in January next year with the multipurpose dredger machines from Finland and will expand to other drains and stretches of the river in a phased manner.
“All the machines will be operational by March, and the drive will begin from the Najafgarh drain, which is the highest contributor of pollution into the river. Once operations stabilise, machines will be deployed across other critical drains and identified Yamuna stretches, ensuring pollution is tackled before it reaches the river, the statement said.
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Verma alleged that pollution in the Yamuna is the result of years of neglect and an outdated system placed under the AAP regime.
“The core objective of the initiative is to stop waste from entering the Yamuna by mechanising cleaning of areas that have historically remained beyond the reach of conventional equipment.
Daily progress monitoring and inter-departmental coordination mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that Yamuna cleaning remains a continuous activity,” the statement added.
Political backdrop
The government’s approval of the Yamuna cleaning campaign comes after BJP faced much flak from its political opponents and netizens for building an allegedly ‘fake’ Yamuna ghat by filling a riverbank area with filtered water during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ceremonial dip at the time of Chhath Puja in October.
Opposition leaders have also criticised the use of chemical defoamers to reduce visible foam in the river, pointing out that the BJP in the past labelled such chemicals “poison” when used by earlier governments.
Keeping on with their campaign calling out Delhi govt for it’s ‘unscientific’ policy, senior AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj challenged CM Rekha Gupta and Water Minister Parvesh Verma to drink a litre of Yamuna water at a public site to prove that it was truly clean.
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