Shame on sinners of the Naag
| Date :10-Sep-2020 |
■ Vijay Phanshikar :
THE view of the Naag River from the hump bridge near Yashwant Stadium on both sides offers a saddening spectacle. Rains have blessed the river with sufficient water. So there is a little sense of relief to the eye that has otherwise seen only sewage water flowing in the stream. The clutch of temples at the Sangam behind the Yashwant Stadium also, therefore, looks somewhat okay superficially. But a deep look reveals the filth that the stream happens to carry all along. It is not without reason that many Nagpurians tend to call the Naag River the city’s septic stream. Seen from any point, even the Pili and the Pohra Rivers, too, offer similar spectacles -- making the Nagpurians sad and helpless.
Absolute muck flows in all the three streams of the city. The Naag River that has given the city its name, its identity, its sense of history is a classic example of how a city rapes its own signature that has a total length of 44 kilometers. Administration after civic administration -- under any dispensation -- has only added to the mess rather than sorting things out properly and scientifically. Most political leaders have paid lip service to the cause of cleansing of the Naag River -- year after year, decade after decade during which the people tried all sorts of political combinations to hand over the civic administration.
But no political party’s administration has done anything sensible as far as the Naag and the Pili and the Pohra Rivers are concerned. So massive is this failure and so consistent that it gives an impression that somebody is deliberately messing up the streams. Looking at what we have done to these streams, one would not be wrong even by an iota if one calls the civic administration a collection of sinners. From time to time, the civic authority did talk of cleansing the Naag River in particular, while adopting only a touch-and-go approach to the Pili and the Pohra Rivers.
The very honourable High Court here, too, had many judges who took interest in issuing instructions or directions or even verdicts to the administration to have the streams cleaned. The leading lights of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation -- Glory be to them; May they ascend to heavens!!! -- have often talked of enlisting financial and technical support from various overseas agencies to cleanse the Naag River in particular. But all the tall talk has proved to be a huge nonsense. It is a matter of utter shame that a city of Nagpur’s size cannot devise a permanent way to keep its three little streams -- cumulatively not measuring beyond the maximum of a hundred kilometers -- clean and environmentally worthy of being called streams. It is a matter of utter shame that the city’s political leaders spend their energies in having a bureaucrat ousted only because of does not listen to them.
It is a matter of utter shame that the city’s political leadership that spends so much energy, time and money in implementing monstrously useless schemes such as the Metro Rail does not find it fit to spend only a fraction of it all to have the three streams cleansed and keep those like that through a permanent mechanism. They all know how one Chief Minister of Gujarat -- who later became the Prime Minister of India -- ensured the complete cleansing of the Sabarmati River and created a beautiful water front where the nation even hosted foreign dignitaries. Yet, they have not done a damn to do something of that kind in their own city. Shame on all such leaders in politics and in administration.