Reviving a ‘dead’ river: a cultural event to celebrate legacy of Yamuna

Subject : History

Section: Culture

Concept :

Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) will host a cultural programme on the banks of the river yamuna in Delhi, under its special project — Riverine Cultures of India — that began in 2018.
The highlight of the event will be a short festival of films on waterbodies, shot by children from across the country.
The programmes will include a photo exhibition comparing the Yamuna of today with what the river was like 50 years ago; symposia on various aspects such as ecology and conservation of India’s rivers and their importance in the country’s heritage; and an exhibition themed on 15 ghats across the country in Sanjhi or paper stencil art.
The larger project is focusing on six rivers right now: Ganga, Yamuna, and Sindhu in the north; and Krishna, Godavari, and Cauvery in the south.
The Yamuna’s confluence with the Ganga and the mythical Saraswati at Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj is one of the country’s most important pilgrimage spots for Hindus.
Yamuna – Dead River
The river had been declared “almost dead” by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2015 citing untreated waste flowing into it from several cities along its banks.
The definition of a river is that it must have life, which is measured by its capacity to dissolve oxygen.
The dissolved oxygen content in the Yamuna as it passes through Delhi is zero.

About IGNCA

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) was established in 1987 as an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture, as a centre for research, academic pursuit and dissemination in the field of the arts.
The IGNCA has a trust (i.e. Board of Trustees), which meets regularly to give general direction about the Centre’s work. The Executive Committee, drawn from among the Trustees, functions under a Chairman.
It is a research unit under Project Mausam.
Project ‘Mausam’ is a Ministry of Culture project with Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), New Delhi as the nodal agency.
The central themes that hold Project ‘Mausam’ together are those of cultural routes and maritime landscapes that not only linked different parts of the Indian Ocean littoral, but also connected the coastal centres to their hinterlands.
A project on design and development of a Vedic Heritage Portal was initiated at IGNCA, under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The portal aims to communicate messages enshrined in the Vedas.