Our performative reverence of rivers hides their neglect (Opinion piece- Times of India)

In this piece publishes in the Times of India, Pune Edition, I explore our complex relationship with India’s rivers - how we worship them publicly yet neglect them quietly. Through personal memories and urban observations, I trace the gap between our performative reverence and the ecological reality beneath.

This article is written through a lens of remembrance, urging us to look beyond rituals and reclaim our rivers as living systems that sustain us.

Full text:

The Mula–Mutha river is my first presence I’ve grown to love from my balcony. She glimmers through tangled trees, a silver ribbon threading through concrete and chaos. In monsoon, she spills into fields, leaving puddles that hold the sky.

Years before this — I still feel the sting of rain on my cheeks as we trudged along the mighty Barak river in Assam’s Silchar. Its swollen waters crashed against the banks with a violence that terrified and thrilled me. Of all childhood memories of visiting my father in the Northeast, this remains carved into my mind, raw and visceral.The Hooghly river in Kolkata felt like an old friend, who knew how to listen. The Zanskar river is a turquoise serpent cutting through Ladakh’s cold, white desert. We chased it on bikes through air so thin it hurt to breathe.

My river memories meander across cities and seasons. They’ve always felt like silent companions, offering comfort without asking for anything in return. But lately, it feels like they’re slipping away. Not just the rivers themselves, but our ability to truly see them. Amid construction’s hammering and urban life’s relentless grind, they recede into background noise. Slowly erased from both landscape and consciousness.

We speak of reverence, but practice troubling neglect. Our remembrance expects rivers to receive our rituals while we absolve ourselves of responsibility. This contradiction played out starkly across India in early 2025. In Prayagraj, the grand Mahakumbh was hosted along the Ganga, drawing 25 million people. Meanwhile, 300 km away, Delhi’s Yamuna foamed with toxic waste. Despair painted fingers, while the river gasped for breath. The Central Pollution Control Board found dangerous contamination levels in Ganga waters before the Mahakumbh. During the festival, faecal coliform bacteria spiked as untreated sewage poured directly in. Nearly 300 metric tonnes of waste was generated daily.

We see only what serves our spiritual narrative while remaining blind to ecological catastrophe beneath our feet. Our remembrance has become performance, requiring rivers to be simultaneously sacred and disposable. Faith has become abuse disguised as devotion.

A river’s identity lives in the intricate web of life it sustains. They are breathing, complex ecosystems, utterly dependent on balance. These ecological arteries now hang on life support, their health dependent on flow velocity, pH levels, dissolved oxygen, riparian zone conditions. Disturb any element and it collapses.

In the Anthropocene epoch, rivers have become battlegrounds between natural systems and human ambition. Massive dams disrupt ancient flow patterns, displacing riverbank communities. Urban sprawl encroaches on flood plains, creating vulnerability when floods reclaim natural territory. Industrial effluents and untreated sewage contaminate water systems. Rivers transform from life-givers into sumps.

In early 2024, thousands gathered at the Ram–Mula confluence in Pune to protest the Rs 4,700 crore riverfront development (RFD) project. The resistance involved multiple citizen groups. Citizens embraced trees marked for felling in Chipko-style protests, while legal petitions challenged environmental clearances. These diverse acts serve as rituals of remembrance in an age of forgetting. They echo an ancient understanding: rivers aren’t mere resources to manage but living systems that sustain all life.

Can we bring them back to life before it’s too late? Can we love them not as stages for rituals or canvases for development, but as the living systems they’ve always been?

Real remembrance fights for what rivers could become again. They are watching and waiting, hoping for survival.