Aam Aadmi Party national convener and former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday addressed one of the biggest criticisms he has faced since taking over governance of the national capital.
Kejriwal, who first shot to prominence for leading his fledgling party to power in 2012, had promised ahead of the Delhi elections in 2020 that he would rid Yamuna of all its impurities. Every year, as a thick layer of froth envelops the Yamuna in Delhi, citizens take to social media to remind Kejriwal of his promise that he would clean Yamuna river "like Thames" in London.
In a recent podcast with influencer Raj Shamani, Kejriwal was reminded of his promise and the sa reality that nothing much had moved towards Yamuna cleaning.
"In 2020, I promised the people of Delhi that we will clean Yamuna in 5 years. The first two and a half years went waste in Covid. In the remaining one and a half years till now, our party leaders were targeted with imprisonment and fake cases. My whole team fell apart... Satyendar Jain, Manish Sisodia and I went to jail. This caused a lot of disturbance.
"Work has begun on this (on Yamuna cleaning).. In the next five years, I believe we will be able to clean Yamuna," Kejriwal said.
Notably, Rs 6,856.91 crore was spent during the 2017-21 period to clean the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna river, the Environment Department said in response to a question raised in the Assembly in march last year.
Yet, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee reports that most of this stretch remains polluted the entire year and is not fit even for bathing. The DPCC report last February said that faecal coliform (microbes from human and animal excreta) found in the river was beyond the “desirable level” at all points except for Palla — where the river enters Delhi.
The faecal coliform level was as high as 500 times the desirable level at the point where the river exits the city, as per the DPCC data.
The issue of Yamuna cleaning has been a political hot potato with the AAP government coming under fire time and again on the matter. Recently, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena accused former Kejriwal of stonewalling his efforts to clean the Yamuna, claiming the AAP supremo feared that he might get the credit for it.
Saxena said that a high-level committee constituted by the National Green Tribunal in January 2023 under the chairmanship of the Delhi L-G to clean and revive the Yamuna had begun work to clean the Yamuna on a war footing. The efforts started becoming visible and an 11-kilometre floodplain was gradually cleaned with the removal of encroachments. The quality of water also started improving, he said.
According to the L-G, the Kejriwal government filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in July 2023 and obtained a stay on the NGT's order on the formation of the HLC. "The cleanliness work came to a standstill... the Kejriwal government did nothing in the last 16 months for the cleaning the river," he said.
The AAP had dismissed the allegations and accused the lieutenant governor of misleading people of the capital on the matter.
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