Why we need to connect city youth with their rivers?

We considered the rivers as foundations of human civilizations. But, that’s before the taps arrived. At a time when we bathed in the rivers, played in their waters, and made regular visits to their banks for various purposes, we enjoyed a different relationship with them. People flock to the rivers even now, but only when there is a festival or if it is floods. Rest of the time, it’s a forgotten entity, mostly a dump yard. A great transition is happening in our minds as far as the image we carry about our rivers. We are now concerned about water, the life-giving resource without which we cannot survive. That’s the reason, as long as we find the water bottle to buy when we are thirsty, we are fine. And this phenomenon is more seen in cities than in villages

In the cities, we have already been calling rivers drains – channels that carry our dirt. As a child, I used to bathe in a tributary of Mahanadi that flows just a couple of hundred metres from my parents’ home. My relationship with the rivers got upgraded when I grew younger and started going to a high school. Then I had the permission to jump into Mahanadi that I call my mother River. Odisha, my home state, calls Mahanadi its mother River. But then my tryst with the tributary did not end. I had the luxury of playing with the tributary as well as the mainstream river. This tributary is now a drainage line and the mainstream river is among the most polluted at the stretch it flows in my city. While, in public perception, we still hold Mahanadi – the mainstream river – in some esteem, we have forgotten the role of the tributary. If such imageries persist in our minds, and especially in those of the millennials and generation Z, time is not far when our rivers will be completely neglected.

Youth & Rivers

Recently, about 30 young people from across the country – most of whom urban dwellers, got connected with our #Youth4WaterIndia campaign and had the opportunity to participate in a National Youth Conclave organised under the G20 initiatives. I had a few rounds of interactions with these youngsters. Most of them are quite sensitive to water and climate crises all of us face. They also flagged off the challenges our rivers face. However, all their attention stayed put on the mainstream rivers like Yamuna, Ganga, Mahanadi, so on and so forth. That gave me a sense of how the image of the tributaries are fading in our minds. We then got engaged with some local youngsters in my city and tried to find out what do they mean by a tributary. We were not surprised at all by what we got. Almost all of them found these ecosystems to be ‘wastewater drains.’
Contrast that with what a tributary is. “A tributary is a freshwater stream that feeds into a larger stream or river. The larger, or parent, river is called the mainstem. The point where a tributary meets the mainstem is called the confluence. Tributaries, also called affluents, do not flow directly into the ocean. Most large rivers are formed from many tributaries”, says a National Geographic encyclopaedic entry for grade 6 to 12. We had engaged with urban students studying in 9 and 10 grades. This may not be a universal scenario and more studies are needed for sure, but the fact remains – and what I have been observing from my long-standing work with youth – that rivers have lost their value in our minds. Their ecosystem services have not gone down but we have stopped valuing them because we don’t go to them on a daily basis. Humans have this unique character of keeping relationships – with fellow beings or nature – as long as they derive a utility value for themselves. That’s the reason we have been categorised into service providers and consumers. We are no more citizens of the civilizations that rivers have blessed us with. Not being river citizens also means that we are losing out on the knowledge of the rich ecosystems these rivers support and in turn help us fight many ecological disasters and build climate resilience of the cities.

Spot your rivulet

This led us to initiating a contest for the youth in which we are asking them to spot the rivulet that feeds their mother River. Through this we intend to bring their attention to the existence and health of the tributaries that play a vital role in enriching the mainstream rivers. In fact, in many cases, the tributaries are too big and are also locally known as mother rivers locally. This however does not change the fate of our rivers, which are facing a crisis at the moment. But to take any actions to conserve our urban rivers, understanding them in totality is very important. And, most importantly, getting the youth involved in this relationship building exercise is crucial. Youth have to be consciously made a major stakeholder in all the programmes and processes that are being planned and/or facilitated to rejuvenate urban rivers. The ‘spot the rivulet’ contest is a beginning in that direction. In fact, many cities in the world have already started to value their rivers and there is a lot of thinking and actions going on in rejuvenating them. The European Centre for River Restoration holds it that, “Rivers are increasingly valued as part of the urban environment, rather than simply a means for removing waste water and rubbish. Successful urban river restoration is as much about establishing trust with local people as it is about improving flows and habitats”. Projects taken up in cities have valued the importance of informing people about the social and economic benefits of urban river restoration, as well as the ecological advantages.

Going beyond clean-ups

We have observed that many youth and youth groups/campaigns are engrossed in clean-up actions. Often one will find social media posts by such groups posing proudly with huge plastic bags filled with all sorts of waste they have picked up from sea beaches and river banks. This certainly helps the youth recognize themselves as eco-warriors and such one-off actions can help them be part of some positive change. But we need campaigns and initiatives that go deeper than this in working towards rejuvenation. I have personally been part of many such clean-up drives. It’s self-satisfying but then when you realize that the garbage you pick up is changing only your own behaviour and not that of other city dwellers, you are forced to think about long-term and systematic interventions. The litter we gather and dispose of at the garbage pick-up points ultimately land up at the landfill sites, most of which are not sanitary systems. The next Sunday you come to the spot you had cleaned; you find it has been littered again. There is no end to it.
The real step should start with understanding the water commons around you, in your cities. You have to find out the many impacts urban habitations have had on the rivers. The change in water quantity and quality, the change in geomorphology, their ability to support wildlife and other species, the changes in the flora, increase in invasive species, changes in the floodplains, and many such indicators of the changing health of urban rivers have to be understood if cities are serious about securing the water of their geographies and making them climate resilient. And all this cannot happen by re-building the bond between people and their rivers. We have started this process with the youths in our campaign. Let us
join hands!