How Ambedabadis are cleaning their Sabarmati

India Today

9 hours ago

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 16, 2025)It's a sewage drain, it's a garbage bin, no, it's a riverbed! The 11.5 km stretch of Sabarmati along the much-feted Riverfront in Ahmedabad has been emptied of water. How and why? The first is easily answered. The Sabarmati doesn't exactly fit the classic prototype of a flowing river, much less a perennial one. Narmada water is diverted into it from a canal 20 km upstream from the Riverfront, and a barrage holds it in at the other end—so it's functionally closer to a long lake under human control. Ergo, it can be emptied.advertisementTONNES OF MUCK'Why' yields a rather more intriguing answer. In what's possibly an exercise that's never been seen before in the world, an emptied river is being cleaned—manually. Good samaritans and tireless squads of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) are physically picking up filth from the riverbed. The Sabarmati Riverfront has been projected as an urban marvel, but there's one fact that never made it to tourism brochures.
This hallowed water body, whose very name evokes the self-cleansing ethos of a Mahatma, has entire rivers of untreated sewage flowing into through 43 outfalls within city limits. The AMC estimates the volumes of vile sludge at some 786.49 million litres per day (MLD). Add plastic garbage, discarded clothes and religious flags, and you can see why 251 tonnes of garbage was removed from the riverbed in just the first four days of the month-long drive.advertisementSummer brought the chance for spring cleaning. If the Karai Dam controls the water inflow, the Vasna barrage keeps the water within the city. 'One barrage door had to be repaired, so water had to be drained for a month. I turned adversity into opportunity and invited volunteers to help clean the riverbed,' says AMC commissioner Bancha Nidhi Pani. 'On average, 2,500 volunteers turn up every morning, with the number reaching 10,000 on a Sunday.' So it has genuinely resonated with the local community. Some say this is quixotic repair work that leaves the original problem intact. What plagues the river is a deep rot, literally: take outfalls for allegedly 'treated' sewage, untreated industrial effluents with no allegations of purity, and thousands of illegal connections plugged into the AMC's stormwater network.
The city generates some 1,693 MLD of sewage. Its 14 sewage treatment plants (STPs) have a capacity of 1,252 MLD. Not more than 1,080 MLD is treated every day: the STPs go periodically into spells of dysfunctionality and maintenance mode. A 27 km mega pipeline is meant to route 120.8 MLD treated effluents from Narol, Naroda, Vatva and Odhav industrial estates, but the five Common Effluent Treatment Plants either do not function or fall short in capacity. Studies show high concentrations of organic pollutants and not enough oxygen for aquatic life. The effluents also seep into the groundwater, used to draw drinking water for nearly 500,000 homes.'The unaccounted sewage isn't even routed through STPs,' says environmental engineer Mahesh Pandya, who runs the NGO Paryavaran Mitra. Ahmedabad's urban sprawl is the issue: its population has doubled to 9 million since 2000, including the lakhs in the unserved ghettos. 'But the trunk infrastructure has not caught up. It's a socio-political problem.'A 2021 suo motu PIL by theGujarat High Court spurred some action. The AMC has introduced bioremediation—partially treating sewage using bacterial consortia—but missed its first deadline of March 1. Why all the new urgency? Put it down to the city's ambition is to emerge as a global sporting capital. The 2036 Olympics is on its mind. The river will be the cynosure of all eyes.Subscribe to India Today MagazineMust Watch
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