What is the condition of rivers in India in past in present in future?

Today in official documents these rivers have been renamed as drains. There cannot be a bigger loss. On International Rivers Day, we bring this collection of writings to celebrate the river

.

 We have lost rivers. But there was a time when there was a river in everybody's life. Cultures developed alongside rivers. Place the ad code on articles you want ads to appear in, in between the HTML of your content It can take 20–30 minutes for the ad to appear on the page. At first, the ad might show as a normal display ad, but it will soon be replaced by a native ad. See the code implementation guide for more details. Rivers sustained farmlands, they were home to variety of fish, they were conduits of commerce and cultural exchange. People followed waterways, from canals to great rivers, to build businesses, communities, and new lives. Rivers were revered and feared. 

The river was a playmate to a child to splash or joy for a woman after a hard day’s domestic toil. A river could also be the unpredictable elder who inspired awe. Flooding at many times turned a harbinger of life and prosperity into a raging torrent of large-scale destruction that destroyed human lives and ruined food crops leading to food shortages and starvation. But people learned to live with such vagaries. They learnt about the ebbs and flows of rivers. They tried to avoid places where its raging waters would strike, and congregate at those where it would be at its nurturing best. They learnt to make use of the silt left by its floodwaters and to avoid the sand which harmed their crops. Place the ad code on articles you want ads to appear in, in between the HTML of your content It can take 20–30 minutes for the ad to appear on the page. At first, the ad might show as a normal display ad, but it will soon be replaced by a native ad. See the code implementation guide for more details. But even then rivers flooded, changed courses and wrought destruction. People learnt to take that in their stride, sometimes with wit which our folklore is replete with.

 Over the past 150 years or so, this connection has been severed. The change happened sometime during colonial rule. Colonial water planners and water engineers introduced the idea of tapping rivers. Colonial intervention transformed seasonally inundated floodplains into sites for irrigation sites involving construction of barrages and weirs. But colonial hydrology could not come to terms with the idiosyncracies of Indian rivers. 

Replete with sand and sediment, most of them refused to flow between banks. Unfortunately, our planners did not take note of this failure of the colonial state when they devised plans for Indian rivers. At the same time, the people also lost the spiritual connect with rivers. Today many grow into adulthood without having seen a river in its full glory. Many of the mighty rivers have been reduced to a trickle. 

A lot of us still venerate rivers. In fact, the pilgrim throngs to sites associated with the big rivers, Ganga, Yamuna

YAMUNA

and Brahmaputra, seem to be growing over the years. But there is a discord between such ritual veneration and the ways we treat our rivers.

Every pilgrimage adds to the trash burden on rivers. . Many of our rivers have turned into veritable sewers. Some of them are toxic cesspools. Today in official documents these rivers have been renamed as drains