The Yamuna is in a very poor state with insufficient flows for most of the days even during the monsoons ( South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, July, 2022). The enhanced levels of pollution can be historically traced to the setting up of the modern waterborne sewerage system for New Delhi that was put in place after New Delhi’s inauguration as the British capital city in 1931. Despite the Yamuna being considered a goddess by the Hindus, the river has been connected to waste, with domestic sewerage and industrial effluents flowing into it, other than the dumping of ritual wastes. The floodplains have been sites of cremation, while also being home to riverine communities, other than many unauthorized housings in the last two decades, that have cumulatively contributed to the environmental vulnerabilities. Alongside restoration interventions since the early 2000s, the Yamuna flood plains have witnessed construction of the Commonwealth Games Village in 2010, three thermal Power Plants (Indraprastha, Pragati I and II), a bus depot among others built spaces. While the Indraprastha Power Plant has been shut, the other two have been converted to Gas. In the East Bank, the flood plain is under a large forest patch as well as agricultural farming and private plant nurseries. The National Green Tribunal’s latest order (January, 2021) points to the inadequate functioning of diverse government bodies while also noting the continuity of encroachments on Zone O of the floodplains (that is regarded as flood prone and hence there is an embargo on any construction in this zone by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).The diversity in land use and the built environment in the flood plains in this stretch of the river, including the judicial and policy interventions and conflicts, the concern of poor governance of Sewerage Treatment Plants, make it an appropriate site for studying the nexus between the physical environment of the Yamuna and societal and material action in the Delhi city.

The disruption of the Yamuna is progressive and multi-layered. It can be traced historically to the making of the modern colonial city of Delhi through the rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ in relation to waste management with the setting of the waterborne sewerage system. Currently, the West Bank of the Yamuna river flood plains in Delhi has land of the fly ash pond from the power plants in 2010, that had been converted by the Delhi Transport Corporation into a Bus parking. In addition, there is a government Plants Nursery, a CRPF ( Central Reserve Police Force) camp, a CNG( Compressed Natural Gas) filling station. In the East Bank there is the Yamuna Bank Metro ( Under Ground) complex which includes a Bus Depot, station and residential property. Starting with the water sewerage system implemented by the British, the gaps in waste water management in postcolonial India, the spate of constructions on the river’s active flood plain that have occurred amidst the setting of the legal regime for environmental protection in India, with conflicts between diverse development agencies and stakeholders, have led to non-implementation of many orders of the NGT. The governance of the new Sewerage Treatment Plants ( STPs) have been observed by water activists to be a very severe problem that undermines efforts to revive the river's ecology. Studies of the Yamuna Flood Plains in Delhi have identified the contribution of riverine communities farmers, fisherfolks and cattle herders in these floodplains. Disruption of the Yamuna have thus occurred across different periods of history, aided by diverse regimes of urban governance and planning, evolving logics and imagination of urbanisation and the failure to contain environmental and social vulnerabilities.

Our case study is situated on the understanding drawn from Ulf Hannerz ( 1992) that while rivers connect diverse aspects of socio- economic life to one-another, the intricacy of this connectivity is the result of complexity in the social organisations. Inspired by the work of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, sociologist Martina Low’s discussions of the interactions between societal actions and material structures in the development of space and anthropologist Setha M. Low’s work on public space,  we  address the disruption of the Yamuna between1920-2020, bringing the physical, material qualities of the environment in relation with their human, cognitive and societal aspects. As Awadhendra Sharan (2014) has observed, “Delhi’s water, we suggest, was subject to the same play of colonial difference as other schemes of improvement were to be and what emerged in the wake of a century’s efforts at improvement was a city and a capital, adjacent in space but destined towards different futures”. Our research will both trace and investigate the changing space of river Yamuna (including its floodplains) alongside rampant urbanization of Delhi, historically and in the present through 1990-2020, through social activities and structures, noting the urban form to be a relational concept (Daniel Kiss and Simon Kretz, 2021). We shall study the nexuses occurring within psychological, sociological and economic and administrative spaces, spaces of imagination, in combination with each other, and the Yamuna as a public space as it emerges through the network of various administrative plans. The results of our analysis can support existing revitalization initiatives of the Yamuna with the understanding of urban space being produced by societal processes, through “arrangements” of living beings and social goods, a space being created through processes of perception, memory, imagination and usage as it manifests as a social structure, offering insights on inequalities, justice, wellbeing and thereby human development.