Fifty years, six chief ministers, dozens of expert committee reports, international alarm over pollution threat to the Taj Mahal, Supreme Court and NGT interventions, yet the dream of a barrage over the Yamuna river in Agra eludes translation into reality.
Ten BJP legislators, three MPs, a mayor with a hundred corporators of the municipal corporation, have failed to stir the Yogi Adityanath government to speed up the barrage project, hanging fire for decades.
The politicians blame the bureaucrats who in turn blame the judiciary which waits for NOCs from environmental bodies. Like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, everything goes round and round, reaching nowhere.
Agra north MLA Purushottam Khandelwal said he recently met the Chief Minister in Lucknow, who informed him that the government would actively pursue the case in the Apex Court. The local irrigation department says clearance is awaited from a committee of the central environment ministry.
Interestingly, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath laid the foundation stone in 2017 for a rubber dam project 1.7 km downstream of the Taj Mahal.
Earlier, two Congress chief ministers had also laid the foundation stones for the same project.
The objectives of the project spelt out by the UP Irrigation Department stated: to create storage of water all the time in dry river behind the Taj Mahal, to recharge the ground water level, navigation (Nitin Gadkari in 2015 had announced launching of a ferry service for tourists from Delhi to Agra), water ponding near foundation of the Taj Mahal, beautification surrounding the Taj Mahal, providing a bridge/roadway alongwith proposed barrage for reducing the traffic density.
Activist of Agra Vyatha Dr Sanjay Chaturvedi said: “The Chief Minister had announced on October 26, 2017, a decision to construct a barrage 1.5 km downstream of Taj Mahal. The project approved by the departmental chief engineers committee, will be 475 metres long, with two bays for navigation. The Archaeological Survey of India had asked for pond level of the barrage to be kept at 146 m, the safe level for the Taj and other monuments on the banks of Yamuna.”
Green Activist Devashish Bhattacharya said that presently, all the water of river Yamuna is diverted into canals at Hathini Kund.
“From downstream of Hathini Kund water is released for the Okhla barrage in Delhi, and a small quantity for the Gokul barrage in Mathura. By the time the river Yamuna enters Agra district, it practically is reduced to a vast sewage canal carrying industrial effluents, sewage, all the garbage and stinking sludge from upstream cities. This highly noxious and toxic liquid called water is poisoning the underground reserves and could possibly be damaging the foundations of monuments along the banks,” said River Connect Campaigners Harendra Gupta, Chaturbhuj Tiwari, and Jugal Kishor Pandit.
Mathura got its Gokul barrage in 1997 without demanding it, however, Agra which needed water most in the river for the good health of the Taj Mahal and other monuments, as pointed out by Dr S Vardrajan, in 1978 and subsequently on several occasions demanded by MC Mehta, whose PIL in the Supreme Court triggered a series of drastic measures in the eco sensitive Taj Trapezium Zone, in 1993, has been the beneficiary of only promises, says river activist Padmini Iyer.
Local citizens vehemently blame the BJP government in UP which they allege harbours a grouse or bias against Agra, for being a Mughal city, despite the fact that it’s a BJP stronghold returning horde of MLAs, MPs and mayors, year after year.
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