Every winter for over a decade now, the same photograph has done the rounds: devotees standing waist-deep in a river choked with a thick, toxic white foam, performing Chhath Puja on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi. Every year, a chief minister promises this will be the last such image. Every year, the promise is renewed rather than fulfilled. In June this year, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta launched yet another "Yamuna Riverfront Cleanliness Campaign," this time spread across 28 ghats, with roughly 500 organisations and thousands of volunteers pledging to restore what she called the river's "glory." It is a familiar scene, only with a new set of faces — the previous government, led by Arvind Kejriwal, had made an almost identical pledge, promising to clean the Yamuna to bathing standard by February 2025.
Both governments, separated by a change of power at the Centre and in Delhi in early 2025, inherited the same river — and the same uncomfortable truth: India has now spent more than two decades and, by conservative estimates, well over ₹20,000 crore across all schemes and all governments trying to clean roughly 22 kilometres of a 1,376-kilometre river, and the water at nearly every monitoring point downstream of Delhi still fails to meet even the most basic safety standards for human contact.
A River That Predates the Republic's Promises
The Yamuna originates at the Bandarpunch glacier near Yamunotri in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, and travels through Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh before merging with the Ganga at the Sangam in Prayagraj. Along this entire 1,376-kilometre journey, it is the 22-kilometre stretch through Delhi — from Wazirabad to Okhla — that has become the most scrutinised, most litigated, and most expensively "cleaned" stretch of river in the country, even though it accounts for barely two percent of the river's total length.
The first organised attempt to address this began with the Yamuna Action Plan (YAP-I) in 1993, funded jointly by the Government of India and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, followed by YAP-II in the early 2000s and YAP-III later in that decade. These plans focused on building sewage treatment plants (STPs) and interceptor sewers along the river's major drains in Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. By 2013, the Delhi Jal Board, the Uttar Pradesh government and the New Delhi Municipal Council together told the Supreme Court that they had spent roughly ₹4,439 crore over the preceding 18 years pursuing the court's own directions to make the river's water potable. A year later, Parliament's Standing Committee on Urban Development noted that despite roughly ₹6,500 crore having been spent, the Yamuna "seemed dirtier than before."
Counting the Crores: What Has Actually Been Spent
The spending did not stop there — if anything, it accelerated. A 2025 assessment by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a respected Delhi-based environmental research body, found that the Delhi government alone spent ₹6,856.91 crore between 2017-18 and 2021-22 on Yamuna-related works — mostly on constructing new STPs, upgrading existing ones, desilting sewer lines and controlling the flow of major drains. Separately, under the central government's Namami Gange Programme, 23 projects worth ₹4,290 crore have been sanctioned specifically for the Yamuna basin, aimed at creating or rehabilitating close to 1,840 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage treatment capacity across Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. As of October 2021, roughly ₹1,672 crore of that had actually been utilised.
By 2024, media reports citing government figures noted that the Centre had handed over a further ₹8,500 crore to the Delhi government for Yamuna rejuvenation, on top of everything spent previously. And in 2025, the Delhi government under its new leadership unveiled a fresh 45-point action plan for the river, this time backed by a budget of roughly ₹9,000 crore, targeting completion within a defined timeframe and, notably, introducing performance-linked funding for the agencies responsible — the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC).
Add these figures together — Yamuna Action Plan spending through the 1990s and 2000s, the ₹6,500 crore flagged by Parliament in 2014, the ₹6,857 crore CSE documented for 2017-22, the ₹8,500 crore Centre-to-Delhi transfer, and the ₹9,000 crore committed under the newest plan — and India's cumulative investment in cleaning roughly 22 kilometres of river comfortably crosses ₹20,000 crore, without counting inflation-adjusted historical spending or state-level allocations in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
What the Water Itself Is Saying
Numbers on a budget sheet mean little if the river itself shows no improvement — and by nearly every independent measure, it has not. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) assessed 33 monitoring locations along the Yamuna between January 2021 and May 2023, checking dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and faecal coliform levels. The results, later placed before Parliament's standing committee on water resources, were stark: while all four monitored sites in Uttarakhand and all four in Himachal Pradesh met water quality standards, every single site in Haryana and Delhi failed — none of the seven Delhi monitoring points complied.
DPCC's own data illustrates just how sharply conditions have deteriorated at the very points the government's own agencies monitor. The Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) — a measure of organic pollution, where anything below 3 mg/litre is considered acceptable for bathing — rose dramatically at almost every station between 2017 and 2022: from around 3 to 9 mg/l at Wazirabad, from roughly 30 to 50 mg/l at the ISBT Bridge, from 22 to 55 mg/l at the ITO Bridge, from 23 to about 60 mg/l at Nizamuddin Bridge, and from around 30 to 73 mg/l at Asgarpur, where the river finally exits Delhi. Dissolved oxygen — the parameter that determines whether the river can sustain any aquatic life at all — has been recorded at effectively zero at most of these midstream and downstream points, including during the monsoon, when higher flows would normally be expected to dilute pollution rather than let it concentrate.
Even at Palla, the point where the river enters Delhi from Haryana relatively cleaner, conditions have worsened. On 16 December 2024, CPCB data showed BOD at Palla spiking to 13 mg/l against the safe limit of 3 mg/l, while faecal coliform — a direct indicator of raw sewage contamination — measured 9,400 MPN per 100 ml, nearly four times the permissible limit of 2,500 MPN/100 ml for outdoor bathing. By August 2025, the Ministry of Jal Shakti itself acknowledged that downstream stretches at Nizamuddin, Okhla and Asgarpur continued to record BOD levels far in excess of the safe limit, with faecal coliform counts ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions per 100 ml.
The 22-Kilometre Problem
Delhi's stretch of the Yamuna is small in length but disproportionately large in impact. CSE's 2025 assessment found that of the roughly 22 drains discharging effluent into the river within Delhi, just two — the Najafgarh drain and the Shahdara drain — together account for around 84 percent of the total pollution load the city contributes to the river. Some estimates attribute as much as 70 percent of that burden to the Najafgarh drain alone, which effectively functions as an open sewer carrying waste from a vast catchment across west and southwest Delhi and Gurugram.
Compounding the pollution load is a flow problem: the river simply does not carry enough clean water through Delhi to dilute what enters it. Water released from the Hathni Kund Barrage in Haryana, upstream of Delhi, is frequently a fraction of what the river would need to flush pollutants downstream — flow as low as 3,107 cusecs was recorded in October 2024, a period when the river should, in theory, still be benefiting from the tail end of the monsoon. With most of the river's natural flow diverted upstream for irrigation and drinking water even before it reaches the capital, what remains within Delhi is disproportionately sewage rather than river water for much of the year.
Where the Money Meets the Wall
If funding has not been the constraint, what has been? The most detailed answer yet came in March 2026, when the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tabled a scathing performance audit of the Delhi Jal Board before the Delhi Legislative Assembly. The report found that the DJB had failed to arrive at realistic estimates of how much sewage Delhi actually generates — a basic planning failure that undermines every downstream decision about how much treatment capacity is actually needed. It further found that more than half of groundwater samples tested in the city between 2017-18 and 2021-22 were unfit for drinking, and that out of 776 water samples collected from 38 water bodies in 2022, only 21 percent were fit even for groundwater recharge — meaning the rest was effectively adding to, not relieving, the pollution burden on the city's water bodies, the Yamuna included.
The CAG also flagged a structural governance gap that has persisted for over a decade: the Delhi Water Board (Amendment) Bill of 2011, meant to strengthen the DJB's regulatory authority over groundwater, has still not been enacted more than fourteen years after it was drafted — leaving no single authority clearly empowered to regulate, control or develop the city's groundwater resources.
The Recurring Complaints
- Incomplete sewer connectivity: Large sections of unauthorised colonies and older neighbourhoods remain outside the formal sewer network, so their wastewater bypasses treatment entirely and flows through stormwater drains straight into the river.
- Under-utilised treatment capacity: Several existing STPs have historically run below their rated capacity or intermittently, due to maintenance gaps, inconsistent power supply or staffing shortfalls — a distinction between capacity built on paper and capacity actually delivered.
- Fragmented, multi-state governance: The Yamuna crosses Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, each with its own pollution control body, water utility and political priorities — coordination between them on a shared river has historically been weak, a point the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has repeatedly flagged.
- Delayed interceptor sewer projects: Projects meant to intercept sewage from major drains before it reaches the river — first flagged as delayed by Parliament's Standing Committee as far back as 2014 — have continued to face implementation delays even a decade later.
- Industrial effluent monitoring gaps: Enforcement against industrial units illegally discharging into drains or the river remains inconsistent, despite repeated directions from the NGT and the Supreme Court.
What the Courts and Tribunals Have Said
The judiciary's patience with this cycle has visibly thinned. In October 2023, the NGT pulled up the Delhi government for failing to complete the tapping of drains, laying sewer lines in unauthorised colonies and jhuggi-jhopri clusters, upgrading STPs, managing industrial waste and faecal sludge, and enabling wastewater reuse — essentially the same list of gaps that had been flagged years earlier. By August 2024, the tribunal took suo motu cognisance of Yamuna pollution altogether, an unusual step signalling that it no longer considered periodic status reports from state agencies sufficient. The Supreme Court, for its part, has on multiple occasions over the past two decades directly questioned state governments and the DJB on where exactly the "crores of rupees" spent have gone, given that pollution readings kept worsening rather than improving.
A New Government, an Old Promise
February 2025 brought a genuine political shift: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unseated the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi after more than a decade, with Rekha Gupta taking over as Chief Minister. Cleaning the Yamuna was among her government's earliest and most visible commitments. In May 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah convened a high-level meeting specifically on the Yamuna, drinking water and Delhi's drainage systems, calling for a "20-year vision" rather than short-term fixes, and pushing for the use of modern technology such as drone mapping of drains to identify untapped discharge points.
By October 2025, ahead of that year's Chhath Puja, Chief Minister Gupta claimed her government's interventions — including bamboo-net foam barriers and water sprinkling at ghats, alongside upgraded and newly tendered STPs — had prevented the visible froth that had embarrassed successive governments during the festival in previous years. In June 2026, the government's Yamuna Riverfront Cleanliness Campaign was launched across 28 ghats, with Water Minister Parvesh Verma indicating that visible, measurable results should be expected within three years. Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena, who had earlier extended the river's "bathing standard" deadline from Kejriwal's original February 2025 target to 2026, has continued joint inspections of drains and river stretches alongside the Chief Minister.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Yamuna Action Plan (YAP-I) launched with Japanese funding assistance |
| 2013 | Delhi, UP govts and DJB report ₹4,439 crore spent over 18 years, to Supreme Court |
| 2014 | Parliamentary panel flags ₹6,500 crore spent, river "dirtier than before" |
| 2017–22 | Delhi govt spends ₹6,857 crore on Yamuna clean-up (CSE assessment) |
| 2023 | NGT pulls up Delhi govt over incomplete drain-tapping, STP and sewer work |
| Feb 2025 | Original Kejriwal-era "bathing standard by 2025" deadline lapses; BJP forms Delhi govt |
| 2025 | Delhi govt unveils 45-point plan, ₹9,000 crore budget; deadline pushed to 2026 |
| Mar 2026 | CAG audit finds chronic DJB mismanagement, groundwater and sewage data gaps |
| Jun 2026 | Yamuna Riverfront Cleanliness Campaign 2026 launched across 28 ghats |
The Way Forward
Having worked on environmental compliance and water management across industrial and municipal contexts, I would argue the Yamuna's problem has never really been a shortage of funds, technology, or even political attention — every government in the last decade has genuinely tried, in its own way. What has been missing is continuity of accountability across administrations, and a shift from measuring success by capacity commissioned to measuring it by outcomes delivered.
Three shifts would matter more than any single new scheme. First, last-mile sewer connectivity needs to be treated as seriously as headline STP capacity — a treatment plant cannot clean sewage that never reaches it. Second, operations and maintenance budgets for existing plants need to be ring-fenced and protected from the political cycle the way capital budgets currently are, since a plant running at 40 percent uptime is functionally similar to a plant that was never built. Third, real-time, publicly accessible water quality data — not periodic status reports filed ahead of court hearings — would let citizens, auditors and courts alike hold agencies accountable between headline-grabbing clean-up campaigns, not just during them.
The Yamuna will very likely see more campaigns, more crores sanctioned, and more deadlines set and missed before it sees a sustained recovery. Whether the current administration's ₹9,000 crore plan breaks that pattern, or simply becomes the next line item future auditors cite, will depend less on how much more money is spent and more on whether the institutional gaps this article has traced — sewer connectivity, plant uptime, inter-state coordination, and regulatory accountability — are finally closed.