Urban Farming,Planning and Environmental Jurisprudence in Delhi

Introduction

If a city’s riverfront symbolises its social and cultural sense of self, then the current state of the Yamuna’s floodplains in Delhi is an apt reflection of the multiple contestations characteristic of its planning and policy approaches to riverine land and its governance. A 44 km stretch demarcated by generations of master planners into rural and urban segments, the Yamuna’s floodplains in Delhi are home to a vast array of built forms and settlement typologies. As many as four of Delhi’s many historical cities were built along the Yamuna and their remains may still be seen as forts and palaces along its banks. Although a biodiversity park and a bird sanctuary mark the northern and southern reaches of the river’s extent in Delhi, very little of the floodplains today remains free from human urbanising intervention. A considerable portion of this region, however, still witnesses agricultural activity, occurring in uneasy proximity to, and sometimes amidst, expressways, refugee rehabilitation colonies, unauthorised residential colonies, luxury apartments, informal settlements, state and central administrative complexes, sports stadia, landscaped parks, bus depots, thermal power plants, crematoria and many places of worship. Most of the agriculture-related activities pursue and occupy a liminal space within existing domains of legality, trenchantly negotiating and exercising claims at multiple levels to stay put in what is mandated to be a zone of ‘ecological significance’ (DDA, 2010: 1).

There is, thus, a deeply uneasy co-existence of rural and urban forms of life and activity, replicated in myriad ways across South Asia, and indeed the world, at a time when demographic, economic and increasingly ecologically-focused arguments clash over competing rights and expectations at multiple levels. Against this complex backdrop of the larger, pervasive public vision of environmental protection and ecological restoration of the Yamuna and its floodplains, this article examines how bourgeois environmentalism and aspirational urban planning have brought about a recalibration and diminution of justice for agrarian communities living and working along the Yamuna in Delhi. Bela Estate, the research site, is one such agrarian community in the urban segment of the Yamuna. It is one of four riverine revenue (nazul) estates earmarked for agricultural activities in the 1940s (Singh, 2015). Bela Estate has been home to generations of farmers who have extensively contributed to Delhi’s food systems. As such, this instance of urban farming is representative of the synergies between the rural and the urban in South Asia, wherein the socio-political boundaries between the two have conventionally not been as rigidly demarcated as they are in modern planning regimes emergent from the industrialised Global North.

For more than a decade, though, Bela Estate has been visible more as Phase 1 of the DDA’s Yamuna Riverfront Development Project, as part of which the agency plans to gentrify the floodplains by creating tourist attractions in the form of landscaped parks as well as marshlands. Notably, the National Green Tribunal (NGT), India’s prominent apex court of law for environmental litigations (Gill, 2017), put a ban on farming of edible crops in this region in 2015, primarily in view of concerns over the toxicity of the local produce (NGT, 2015). Empowered by this interlinkage of governmental and judicial visions, the DDA has since then conducted an incessant series of demolition drives for over a decade now to evict local farmers and clear the land for redevelopment.

This article examines the resulting inflection of jurisprudence and legality with the state’s aspiration to remake Delhi’s image as a sustainable, global city, arguing that this has led to the diminution of avenues for livelihood and justice for occupational communities like farming, which of late have become considered as undesirable in the city. Utilising archival sources and closely reading planning documents and key court judgements, the article decodes the ongoing contentions involving farmers, planning agencies and the judiciary in this region. Beginning from a contextualisation of the research site within the broader history of riverine planning in modern Delhi, the article moves on to reflect on the key shifts in the principles and ends of planning, which began to unfold soon after the establishment of the DDA in 1957. This examination of aspirational underpinnings of riverine planning as outlined in the three master plans of Delhi informs the ensuing discussion on the evolving nature of environmental jurisprudence in the city. The article concludes with comments on this environmental turn in planning and urbanisation in Indian cities like Delhi, highlighting the erosion of social justice which this is bringing for many socially, economically and spatially marginalised communities in India’s cities, specifically for urban farming activities.

Contextualising Bela Estate: A Socio-Historical Profile

Contemporary regimes of land governance and ownership in India are rooted in colonial notions of land as primarily a source of revenue. While the British retained many pre-existing, Mughal categories of land revenue and governance, they reconceptualised them to strategically serve their interests as an extractive, colonial power. Nazul is one such example. Under the Mughals, this term signified lands belonging to the state under the monarch, but distinct from estates held personally by him, which were known as taiul (Gupta, 1981). Nazul as a pivot of the land revenue regime underwent revisions after the formal inauguration of British imperial rule in the mid-nineteenth century to subsume both these categories. In Delhi, the erstwhile seat of the Mughal Empire, this transition meant that not only were estates held by the last Mughal Emperor and by his government marked as nazul but also that estates confiscated from rebel nobles and aristocrats came to be re-incorporated as nazul or crown lands (Gupta, 1981: 28–31). Ownership of such land rested ultimately with the British government in India, as did the rights to any revenues raised from it. The lands identified as Bela Estate are supposed to have been held earlier by the Nawab of Awadh and were confiscated and vested with the British Crown along with all other nazul properties in and around the city (Commissioner of Delhi, 1872).

While the history of Bela Estate, which came into existence only during the second decade of the twentieth century, is intertwined with this larger history of how land came to be reordered primarily as a source of revenue in the British Indian Empire, it has also been shaped by fluvial factors determined by sedimentation along the Yamuna and gradual changes in its course (Sharan, 2016). The lands identified today as Bela Estate witnessed over time how construction of barrages upstream and land reclamation in the city reduced the Yamuna’s flow and caused it to shift course towards the east (Sharan, 2016). For much of the second half of the nineteenth century, Bela was a loosely applied appellation for the swampy woodland immediately towards the north-east of Shahjahanabad, the Mughal city of Delhi. This forest had grown over the two decades immediately after the Mutiny of 1857, after which the government at Lahore directed first the provincial forest department in 1869 and then the district authorities in 1874 to manage the area as a fuel plantation (Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, 1905). However, there was consistent lobbying by leading citizens against the dangers, malarial and otherwise, and the inconveniences of having a large plantation so close to the city. Together with financial losses in its maintenance, this caused the land to be transferred to the Delhi Municipal Committee in 1878, which gradually chose to raze the plantation and level the ground for the city’s northward expansion.

Only some 50 years after this transition did the current contours of the Bela Estate emerge. Delhi had been declared the new capital of British India in 1911, and the Yamuna and its floodplains acquired keen significance for the town planners and architects envisioning the birth of the imperial enclave (Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, 1917). Significantly, the transfer of all nazul land held by the municipality to a newly constituted Nazul Office was effected in 1924 in the wake of this massive realignment of Delhi’s pre-existing administrative apparatus to the capital city’s needs (Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, 1937a). Centralisation of control over land remained a favoured policy in the years to come. The Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT), instituted in 1937, reflected this principle of parastatal intervention by passing duly elected and representative urban local bodies with sweeping, overarching powers and mandates. This replicated a model of controlled urban growth with widespread administrative appeal throughout the British Empire. Archival records reveal that the DIT was entrusted with as many as 23 nazul estates for expansion and redevelopment of the city subsequent to its formation (Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, 1937b), while by 1940 the military authorities garrisoned in the Red Fort transferred the land parcel created by the gradual eastward shift in the course of the Yamuna to the DIT (Chief Commissioner, 1940).

Against this variegated backdrop, the history of agricultural activity in Bela Estate as we know it today should be located from angles that implicate law and development issues, environmental concerns and the complex discourses of how to implement basic guarantees of rights protection and public interest in the emerging postcolonial democracy. Early judicial orders reveal that DIT leased this and three other riverine estates in its keeping, Inderpat, Chiragah (North) and Chiragah (South) to the Delhi Peasants Co-operative Multipurpose Society (DPCMS) in 1949 (Singh, 2015: 3–4). In the changed political atmosphere after the Partition of 1947 and the pre-existing food shortages caused by the Second World War, agricultural activity so close to the city came to be considered not simply as a source of steady revenue but also a form of sustainable livelihood and a boost to Delhi’s food security. Short-term leases of 5 years were granted to DPCMS with detailed injunctions on not simply which crops to grow but also on preventing the area from becoming swampy and malarial as well as encroached by any other private groups or individuals. In other words, by renting Bela and other riverine estates, the DIT made DPCMS farmers de facto guardians of the Yamuna’s floodplains in Delhi. Follmann (2016: 226) observed:

Institutionalized farming on the floodplain was thus established by the state to ensure the growth of the city through food production but also to check uncontrolled and unplanned growth in terms of encroachment on the fertile lands of the floodplain. The farmer societies thus became a key agent in the city–river relationship.

However, after promulgation of the First Master Plan for Delhi (DDA, 1962), this relationship began to be reframed as incompatible with the city’s cultural and developmental aspirations. For reasons which are still not in the public domain, the DDA chose not to renew the land lease when it expired in 1966. This was notified to the DPCMS, but no eviction proceedings were initiated till 1991, when the first eviction notices were issued under the Public Premises Act of 1958. The DDA, meanwhile, continued to accept rent dues from the DPCMS and its revenue staff kept maintaining land records till as recent as 2010, when large-scale demolition of both informal settlements (bastis) and farms was undertaken in the wake of the Commonwealth Games 2010 (Lal & Pradhan, 2019: 144). Since then, the farming communities in this region have been progressively criminalised, not simply as encroachers but also as polluters, charged with unscrupulously peddling toxic produce in the city’s food chain. As many as 25 ‘demolition/eviction programmes’ were carried out against these communities between 2010 and 2016, with the view to clear the land for ecological restoration of the Yamuna and its floodplains (DDA, 2018). From being at the productive forefront of Delhi’s relationship with its riverine assets, the farmers of Bela Estate have now fallen into a position of disrepute and ignominy as the unwitting casualties of Delhi’s attempt to remake itself as a global, world-class city.

Birthing a Riverfront: Aspirational Planning

Unlike most historical cities built along rivers, Delhi’s relationship with the Yamuna was never functional or transactional. Throughout its medieval history, most citadels in this region were built on eminences at some distance from the river. The three main cities which were built on the river’s banks, Firozabad (mid-fourteenth century), Dinpanah (mid-sixteenth century) and Shahjahanabad (mid-seventeenth century), were not really dependent on the river for their potable water needs. Always a religious and cultural symbol, the Yamuna contributed to Delhi’s growth more as a muse directing its poetry and music, the cyclical ebb and flow of many festivals and fairs which were held on its banks. Haberman (2006: 83) observes that ‘almost all historical accounts mention the beauty of the Yamuna as a major asset of Delhi’. It was only after the consolidation of British imperial rule from the mid-nineteenth century onwards that indigenous systems of water management were abandoned in favour of centralised, technocratic approaches to urban and civic governance. Inauguration of the city’s waterworks towards the end of this century was a key step in this direction (Gupta, 1981), designed to perpetuate the illusion of equitable access to public resources (Verma, 1982). Likewise, planning for New Delhi sought to redirect and channelise the Yamuna as primarily an aesthetic element complementing the monumentality of the new imperial capital (Sharan, 2016).

In other words, planning in contemporary Delhi has a deeply rooted tendency to limit and control infrastructure and service provisioning in order to serve the interests and aspirations of particular groups of privileged elites, which tend to be more conventionally urban and propertied. This is reflected in the Yamuna’s evolving role and position in Delhi’s sociocultural selfhood, from being a beloved emblem of organic urbanity to becoming a peripheral site for resource extraction. The colonial and postcolonial periods alike saw the appropriation of the river and its floodplains for a number of vital public installations, such as the Rail and Road Bridge at Salimgarh in 1866, waterworks at Chandrawal in 1890 and a pumping station at Wazirabad in 1921. Further, there were barrages at Okhla in 1874 and Wazirabad in 1957, thermal power plants at Rajghat in 1951, Pragati Maidan/Indraprastha in 1963 and Badarpur in 1973, the Indira Gandhi Stadium Complex in 1982 and as many as five road bridges and one rail bridge across the 22 km long urban segment of the Yamuna from Wazirabad to Okhla. This steady transformation in infrastructural projects and the related planning principles can be traced through the three key vision documents for Delhi produced over the seven decades following India’s independence in 1947, the Master Plan for Delhi (DDA, 1962), the Master Plan for Delhi (DDA, 1990) and the Master Plan for Delhi 2021 (DDA, 2007). Mirroring the long-term, macroscopic goals of the national five-year planning regime and influenced by the liberal developmentalism of American modernism, master planning in the postcolonial context aimed to reconceptualise the Indian city with a ‘representational clarity, along with a hierarchy of function’ (Sundaram, 2010: 33).

DDA (1962) attempted to inscribe the Yamuna’s floodplains within this emergent schema of hierarchical, aspirational functions. Insistently viewing the floodplains as a riverfront rather than an agricultural space, it chose to birth in this particular instance of riverine planning a reality in ignorance, or negation, of local lived histories and experiences. It sought, first and foremost, to circumscribe the Yamuna within an extensive infrastructural network of bunds, barrages and bridges, which would regulate its flow and minimise the risk of flooding. Designating the entire urban stretch of the Yamuna within the developmental category of ‘District & Regional Parks’, it prescribed the creation of a park-like ‘riverfront south of Yamuna Bridge’ for the Old City Division, a riverfront park in the New Delhi Division, and another large park ‘along the river Yamuna’ in the Shahdara Division (DDA, 1962: 33). These parks were proposed to be developed as part of a ‘system of linked open spaces and district parks … to provide active recreation to the people of the whole area’ (DDA, 1962: 8–9). This zoning reflected the planners’ desire to effect a semiotic transformation of the city and its selfhood, conjuring through the rhetoric of land use zones an ideal of modern, progressive urbanity which would confidently leave behind the anxieties of the colonial past and the horrors of the postcolonial present. It clearly chose to ignore the presence of multiple agricultural activities and of urban farming.

This foundational, transformative desire at the heart of planning imaginaries and processes in contemporary Delhi can also be detected in the Second and the Third Master Plans, albeit with a degree of wary admission of the failures of planning. For instance, DDA (1990: 3) recognises that the high level of pollution in the Yamuna is due to ‘untreated sewage and waste from the industrial areas’ and that dumping of coal ash by the Badarpur Thermal Plant may also pose a threat to the Yamuna. Significantly, like its predecessor, DDA (1990) also makes no mention of the pre-existing agrarian settlements and the emergent informal settlements along the Yamuna in this articulation of an aspirational vision for a global riverfront. It designates the Yamuna and its floodplains as Zone O within an alphabetically arranged developmental scheme and stresses that the Yamuna must be channelised in order for Delhi to be at par with the major metropolitan cities of the world. Such an undertaking would open ‘unlimited opportunities to develop the river fronts’, including ‘a special recreational area on the lines of Disneyland/amusement park’ (DDA, 1990: 54). Identifying the Yamuna as a key natural asset which must be harmoniously developed for better visual integration with the city, the Master Plan suggests that hoardings should not be allowed in or around the riverfront to safeguard it from ‘visual pollution’ and proposes a period of five years for channelisation of the river and consequent development of the riverfront (DDA, 1990: 56, 58, 113–14).

Likewise, the Master Plan for Delhi 2021 identifies the Yamuna as a major ecological feature, which ‘should be conserved and kept free from unrestricted and unplanned urban development’ (DDA, 2007: 11). It admits that the Yamuna suffers from inadequate flow and quantum of water and an extremely high degree of pollution, due to ‘rapid urbanisation, encroachments on the river banks, over exploitation of natural resources/water, and serious deficiencies and backlog in sanitation and waste water management services’ (DDA, 2007: 93). It recommends, amongst other measures, the removal of all slum clusters adjoining the river on account of their contribution of untreated sewage into the river Yamuna, in order to achieve the larger goal of visually integrating the river and its banks with the rest of the city (DDA, 2007: 100, 106). This recurring emphasis on the visual integration of the Yamuna and its floodplains with Delhi throughout the three master plans hints at the state’s and the city’s attempts to make sense, culturally and spatially, of the Yamuna. Baviskar (2011: 46–7) observes this confusion, while also indicating the continuing agricultural aspects of this space:

Urban eyes struggle to make sense of it: is it nature or culture? Both these socially-produced categories come with recognisable markers. If urban nature has come to be identified with manicured parks, the Yamuna is a wilderness of shifting sandbanks, grasses and crops. Nor is it explicable in terms of rural nature: it is neither forest nor intensively cultivated farmland.

If these three master plans articulate the state’s attempts to make sense of the Yamuna and impose order upon it, then the Zonal Development Plan for River Yamuna/River Front, Zone O (DDA, 2010) gives concrete form to the manifold spatial as well as cultural interventions, envisaged to finally transform the river and its floodplains in keeping with the supposedly world-class or global simulacra at the heart of the planning imagination in contemporary Delhi. DDA (2010) takes cognisance of all previous proposals to develop, channelise and clean the Yamuna and its floodplains, even noting that the National Capital Region (NCR) Regional Plan of 2021, which was published in 2005, identifies Zone O as a ‘natural conservation zone’ and recommends agriculture and horticulture, pisciculture and social forestry as viable activities (DDA, 2010: 4). It also recognises agriculture as a prevalent existing land use, suggesting that the best way to get rid of the pesticides and industrial toxins is through measures to protect the catchment areas ‘through methods such as organic or biological farming’ (DDA, 2010: 18). Yet, its strategic vision for riverfront development also specifies that ‘the aim is to achieve maximum economic benefit with minimum public investment to ensure a self-sustaining set up … based on financial and environmental catalysts … for an economically and environmentally healthy riverfront’ (DDA, 2010: 16). In other words, the Plan cements the ongoing recalibration of riverine land as a public commodity which would generate revenue for the local government through the monetisation of a carefully calibrated urban experience of nature. Consequently, the Plan proposes the division of Zone O into eight sub-zones and recommends recreational land use consisting of ‘green stretches, bio-diversity park, forest, botanical park/herbal park, science park, and a theme park without any pucca/permanent construction for as much as a combined 21% of the zone, second only to 67% designated as water body’ (DDA, 2010: 24).

This entrepreneurial approach to urban infrastructure provisioning and city regeneration is symptomatic of worlding, the ‘modeling, inter-referencing, and association’ which have given an urgent, new impetus to local and national governments across the Global South to remake their cities in the image of perceived global/universal/world-class standards (Ong, 2011: 14). While planning under the DDA has doggedly pushed and pursued an ideal of a modern riverfront, the constitution of that ideal has changed over the three master plans and their ancillaries. The initial vision of green open spaces and recreational areas was articulated at a time when riverine pollution was not perceived and problematised as a palpable problem; while, by the Second Master Plan (DDA, 1990), the factoring in of excessive pollution made it seem even more imperative to somehow achieve this ideal. By the third plan (DDA, 2007), however, the terms of debate shifted to rejuvenating urban ecologies and environments in a manner amenable to the aspirational aesthetics of a consumptive, networked civil society. With not just planning but also judicial mandates crafting ‘fields of intelligibility by disseminating standardized aesthetic norms’ (Ghertner, 2011a: 288), pre-existing settlements, claims and contestations, agrarian and informal, continued to be ignored or conveniently listed for demolition and eviction to facilitate the creation of a neat, orderly and entrepreneurial riverfront. This finding emerges from the refusal of hegemonic groups in urban societies like Delhi to acknowledge and accept the multifarious realities of communities pushed to the margins of cities’ social and economic imagination. Given this impelling, pervasive rhetoric, the Yamuna and its floodplains can become legible and accessible to the public eye only with the erasure of land uses incompatible with Delhi’s aggressive, anxious aestheticisation of itself. Such a transformation radically diminishes the access to rights to livelihood and shelter for occupational communities like farmers, whose labour no longer appears compatible with the dominant aspirational conceptualisations of urban land and spaces.

Ecology and Equity: Environmental Jurisprudence

Significantly, this aspiration for a global aesthetic mirroring a networked urbanity is constituted as much by spectacles of monumentality and consumption as by a deep, if often contradictory, desire for a calibrated reversion to nature which often ignores the needs and expectations of residents from marginalised communities. In many postcolonial cities across the world, the creation of protected and limited-access ecological enclaves such as national parks, biodiversity parks and urban forests has been accompanied by spatial and economic injustices borne largely by marginalised sections of society. Dominant sections of society, including in some cases environmental pressure groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), have been able to preserve an ecological ‘landscape and heritage that is part of the desired exclusive urban identity’ (Dellier et al., 2018: 82), which is at once cosmopolitan and global, albeit rooted in real and imagined local histories and traditions. In Delhi, this environmental turn in public and planning discourses may be evidenced not just in statements of intent and policy frameworks, issued regularly by various state agencies but also through the trenchant activism of a disparate set of civil society collectives and stakeholders acting multifariously to assert their specific claims to the city and its ecological assets.

Consequently, most such individuals and groups have chosen to interact much more with the judiciary than with urban local bodies or legislatures to articulate and achieve their goals and intents. The roots of this tectonic shift of civic attention and discourse from the local to the global and notably from the executive to the judiciary in Indian cities lie in the unprecedented transformation of the field of judicial dispensation over the past few decades in India. As Nakazora (2023: 187) suggests with reference to debates on Right of Nature jurisprudence in contemporary India, a ‘context-specific politics of inclusion and exclusion’ characterises the processes of law-making, in ways which make law itself malleable to the values and interests of specific communities and stakeholders at a particular time.

Catalysed by the unrestrained growth of public interest litigation (PIL) as the most popular and publicly visible medium of securing justice for all Indians, this transformation has brought immense social prestige to the higher echelons of the Indian judiciary as the only public-spirited defenders of order and justice in contemporary India, engaged in ‘courting the people’ (Bhuwania, 2016: 4). Consequently, appellate courts such as the Supreme Court of India, the high courts of every state, and a plethora of tribunals wield considerable power and influence over routine matters of urban governance, planning and service provisioning (Sivaramakrishnan, 2011). From pollution to waste management and deindustrialisation to traffic management, these appellate courts, now also prominently the NGT, have been able to use PIL as an instrument to deepen their footprint into quotidian realities of cities. As a result, stakeholders in urban local bodies, parastatals and state governments have been rendered subservient to their will, formally in the public interest, but actually in a highly questionable manner (Bhuwania, 2016: 81):

PIL has made this possible in the arenas in which it has intervened. It provides the procedural framework to create a field for its operation and transform it.… I would argue that it is PIL with the kind of power it vests in judges which actually empowers them to act on their biases (aesthetic, anti-poor or otherwise) and that too with a free hand in a most expansive manner, unconstrained by technicalities and rules of adjudication, and on such flimsy evidence as random photographs.

In Delhi, numerous PIL cases have played a crucial role in reshaping not only the material contours of the city through massive eviction of informal settlements but also inflecting the field of jurisprudence with a distinctively aspirational judicial overreach in pursuit of civic and urban regeneration. The Yamuna has been a key site of this ongoing tussle to create a new urban reality, wherein ecological rejuvenation of the river and its floodplains appear increasingly divorced from equity and justice in terms of access to livelihood and housing for the myriad farming communities settled in Zone O. Premised either on the basis of PIL cases or on suo motu notice taken by appellate courts, Yamuna’s rejuvenation has come to acquire the force of an irresistible juggernaut spawning a disparate array of committees and task forces over the past three decades. All of these have been entrusted one after the other to mostly recommend, and sometimes implement, proposals, plans and suggestions for the restoration of the Yamuna and its floodplains to an imagined pristine form in an ostensibly scientific manner. Consequently, the domain of governance and decision-making pertaining to thousands of families’ livelihoods (Social Design Collaborative, 2022) and a vital public space has been transplanted by the courts from not only electorally accountable bodies like the municipal corporation and the state government but also parastatals like the DDA, to even more select expert committees, such as those used by the NGT, helmed by technocrats and scientists. This trend has led to a situation where their expertise and supposed public-spiritedness alone are taken as valid credentials to invest them with unprecedented power to reshape the contours of the city.

Much of this is apparent in the judgements and orders which various courts have pronounced in matters pertaining to the Yamuna over the preceding decade. This fundamental transition in judicial thinking against the rights of the urban poor to livelihood and shelter to favour the interests and aspirations of propertied citizens appears all the more stark given the pronounced emphasis on ‘the (alienable) right of the working poor to occupy public land to fulfil their livelihood requirements’ (Ghertner, 2011b: 35). This appeared in landmark Supreme Court judgements such as the so-called Pavement Dwellers’ case (Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, AIR 1986 SC 180). From the lowest to the highest courts, the ecological anxiety of the judiciary as a representative of the normative social order has often tended to channelise itself towards conflation of the informal with the polluting, despite lack of substantive evidence to this effect. For instance, in a judgement on a land parcel in Bela Estate issued from the court of the Estate Officer II of the DDA, the presiding officer referred to the following observations made by the High Court of Delhi in CWP No. 2029/2012, as reported in Singh (2015: 11–12):

What is required to be done in the present situation in this never ending drama of illegal encroachment in this capital city of our Republic? River Yamuna which is a major source of water has been polluted like never before. Yamuna Bed and both the sides of the river have been encroached by unscrupulous persons with the connivance of the authorities. Yamuna Bed as well as its embankment has to be cleared from such encroachments. Rivers are perennial source of life and through the civilized world, rivers, its water and its surroundings have not only been preserved, beautified but special efforts have been made to see that the river flow is free from pollution and environmental degradation.

On the one hand, the court dismissed the objections filed by the noticee, that is, the person issued notice of eviction proceedings, as having no merit in law. On the other, it found sufficient reason to make reference to these comments from a separate judgement by a different court to bolster the discursive identification of informal agrarian practices in Bela Estate as amongst the rank and file of the unscrupulous, unauthorised and unhygienic practices which have rendered the Yamuna’s degraded condition a matter for national shame. Rooted as this is in the deep recalibration of the public trust and precautionary principles occurring in the field of environmental jurisprudence from the early 1990s (Sivaramakrishnan, 2011: 919), such forced correlation of lack of formal tenure with mala fide intent against public good and order has made it very difficult for agrarian communities in Bela Estate to obtain justice from the judicial system purportedly working to uphold their rights. Juxtaposed against the court’s significant observation that the land is urgently required for the development of a bio-diversity park, the noticee’s contention that he is a poor farmer and ‘by hard labour and effort has developed the barren land for agriculture purpose’ and that ‘on one hand the Government is regularizing the unauthorized colonies and squatters on Govt. land and on the other hand uprooting the poor farmers who are earning their livelihood by cultivation’ (Singh, 2015: 2) can, therefore, be summarily overruled on procedural grounds. The vehemence of this dismissal of the farming community’s long history of state-sponsored inhabitation and cultivation of Bela Estate as well as their rights to livelihood and shelter appear enabled by the spectre of filth, nuisance and degradation lurking within sight of the court’s legislating vision, seeking to transform urban ecologies which are now seen and imagined as wasteful and polluting.

The pervasive role of this convenient argument of pollution in informing the ecological anxiety of the courts becomes clearer when located with reference to the scant empirical evidence available from the ground. In a report published in August 2019 by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), bringing forth the findings of a study it undertook on directions of the Monitoring Committee instituted by the NGT in 2018, ‘no exceedance was observed in vegetable and fodder samples for metals and pesticides with respect to FSSAI notification’ (CPCB, 2019: 1). Since this study exhaustively collected random soil, water and vegetable samples from 45 sites over a 48 km stretch of the floodplains, its findings may be considered authoritative as well as representative. While the report goes on to conjecture that ‘contamination of soil was observed at most of the monitoring sites which may be due to excessive use of fertilizers’ (CPCB, 2019: 15), it also emphasises that the water quality of the Yamuna containing ‘trace amount of metals at some locations is primarily due to industrial wastewater discharge’ (CPCB, 2019: 15). It recommends, finally, that ‘controlled farming should be looked into by the concerned Govt agencies in the flood plains of River Yamuna’ and that farmers should be trained by the appropriate government agencies in organic farming and on ‘wise and proportionate use of fertiliser, pesticides, w.r.t. dosage’ (CPCB, 2019: 16). In other words, data from nodal regulatory bodies also suggests that industrial effluents and not farming are responsible for pollution in the Yamuna and that the produce grown in the floodplains is safe for human consumption as per prevailing standards.

These recommendations are in line with those of an earlier Expert Committee, constituted in 2014 by the erstwhile Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) on directions of the NGT in Manoj Misra v. Union of India & Ors (NGT, 2015), a case filed by a widely-respected environmental activist helming the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan. Acknowledging that ‘floodplains offer opportunity for seasonal farming’ (Expert Committee, 2014: 2), it was recommended:

The agricultural use of the river bed at suitable locations and away from the riverine fringe should be regulated for farming (by the bona fide members of two existing peasants co-operative societies) of organically grown vegetables, seasonal fruits, and flowers … A mechanism for execution and enforcement of the same and for checking of the lease should be framed. (Expert Committee, 2014: 5)

Significantly, the NGT in 2015 pronounced in its judgement on the original application No. 6 of 2012 that this Expert Committee report shall form an integral part of this judgement and that ‘all the concerned authorities of NCT of Delhi, State of UP and State of Haryana shall implement the same’ (NGT, 2015: 82). The tribunal also took cognizance of DDA’s Yamuna Riverfront Development Plan of 2010 and ordered to modify and alter it to cause least damage to the floodplains and ensure that they ‘be kept in the manner as indicated in the report’ (NGT, 2015: 76). However, the Tribunal also took adverse note of agricultural activity in the region and, referring to newspaper articles, photographs and a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, opined that produce from these areas has ‘been shown to be injurious to human health, primarily for the reasons that the river carries very high pollutants, including heavy metals and acidic elements’ (NGT, 2015: 48). It was further argued that agricultural activity ‘must be checked and if necessary should also be stopped’ (NGT, 2015: 48) if, by the principles of inter-generational equity and comparative hardship, today’s younger generations stands exposed to serious health hazards. The Tribunal concluded that since ‘injury is greater in proportion to the benefit’ in this case, ‘such contaminated produce/vegetables’ should not be ‘offered for consumption to the people at large’ (NGT, 2015: 48–9).

Therefore, going against the recommendations of its own Expert Committee, the NGT concurred with the DDA that even if the farmers have an interest in the land, they cannot carry on an activity which is ‘environmentally improper and is completely injurious to human health, just to make some money’ (NGT, 2015: 52). It ordered, finally, that since agricultural activity in the Yamuna’s floodplains is an indirect but serious public health issue, ‘no authority shall permit and no person shall carry out, any edible crops/fodder cultivation on the Flood Plain. This direction shall strictly be adhered to till Yamuna is made pollution free and is restored to its natural wholesomeness’ (NGT, 2015: 87). Informed as this acute ecological anxiety is by the discursive framing of nuisance at ‘the interstices of legal norms and the popular urban imaginary’ (Ghertner, 2015: 123), the criminalisation of the Yamuna’s farmers as unscrupulous polluters appears then as nothing more than an expedient footnote in the larger, aspirational push towards a reversion to nature, to the floodplains in their pristine state as judges, activists and planners imagine them to have been. The lack of scientific evidence quantifying the farming communities’ alleged contribution to riverine pollution and the presence of scientific evidence negating fears of contamination in agricultural produce does not stand up to the anxiety-ridden ecological consciousness of a supposedly activist judiciary arrogating to itself the role of the executive and the legislature. In effect, the dismissal of the farming community’s basic rights has to be seen in direct tension with Article 21 of the Constitution of India, denying these farming communities not just the right to livelihood and shelter but the right to life itself.

Conclusions

By way of conclusion, it will be instructive to dwell a little more on the NGT’s landmark judgement in Manoj Misra v. Union of India & Ors (NGT, 2015). The importance of this judgement comes not only from the position of the petitioner but also the location of the judgement itself, coming as it does from the Principal Bench of the Tribunal headed by its chairperson, at the time Justice Swatanter Kumar. Pronouncing that this new project to clean the Yamuna be entitled ‘Maily Se Nirmal Yamuna’ Revitalization Project 2017, the judgement put into motion a series of events which have over the past decade led to even more intensive eviction proceedings against the agrarian communities in Zone O. But these activities have also not succeeded in rejuvenating the Yamuna and/or restoring it to its imagined pristine glory. The NGT’s adoption of the slogan maily se nirmal (degraded/filthy to pure/serene) as an affectively potent metaphor hints at the insistent appeal of not only such sensorial iconography in girding the exasperated urgency underlying its manifold interventions on the ground but also reinforces the accelerated reframing of the farming communities as degrading/filthy (maila). The inexorable logic of the judgement suggests that the Yamuna needs to be made pristine through centralised, ostensibly apolitical and scientific initiatives to cut through decades of governmental inaction and vested encroachment. The discourse and rhetoric of pollution and environmental restoration in this instance once again becomes a device to justify the removal of farming communities from lands they had inhabited for decades, in contravention to established principles and precedents in law necessitating the right to livelihood and shelter as well as rehabilitation in case of eviction.

Significantly, the environmental anxieties and aspirations of the courts are aligned in this particular case with those of the planning agencies in a manner which presents dispossession as an inevitability to safeguard the ecological future of the Yamuna. This is reflective of a growing rapprochement between the judicial and planning apparatuses, driven by a framing of public interest which is in practice increasingly premised on the dispossession of marginalised livelihood groups and communities despite the legitimacy of their claims on multiple grounds.

By foregrounding ‘the identity of the “encroacher”, a spatial category that signals a different mediation in the relationship between the individual and the state’ (Bhan, 2017: 167), the courts have transitioned towards legitimising the illegitimatising of agrarian communities in Zone O as unscrupulous encroachers. While equating the encroacher in this case with the polluter, the judicial, planning and media apparatuses have foreclosed any possibility of relief or rehabilitation which is available in principle, at least, to residents of low-income unauthorised settlements in Delhi. Abetted by the dilution and abrogation of sustainable livelihood as a key pivot of civic life as enshrined in Article 21, the demands of both urban ecology and equity are thus being met through this recalibrated jurisprudence, wherein farming as an allegedly polluting activity is no longer an acceptable vocation in the heart of supposedly world-class, global Delhi.

Notwithstanding the irony of evicting nature-based livelihoods like farming to pave the way for ecological restoration and rejuvenation of the Yamuna and its floodplains, the DDA is carrying on with its demolition drives to clear Zone O of its residents in order to give concrete shape to the governmental vision of an ecologically pristine, entrepreneurial floodplain (Social Design Collaborative, 2022: 16). Caught in this impasse, the farmers of agrarian communities like Bela Estate face growing impoverishment and displacement, with little recourse to justice from the courts, nor rehabilitation from DDA. Given that there is little scientific evidence to suggest that they are in any way responsible for the Yamuna’s polluted state and given also that their inhabitation of the floodplains has a complex legacy of state-sanctioned settlement, due process of law must be followed to ensure adequate compensation and rehabilitation to the farming communities instead of ongoing evictions and displacement. Posited as sustainable, inclusive and even empowering, the environmental turn in planning and urbanisation in Indian cities like Delhi thus risks resulting in not only erasure of the tenuous rights and concessions won by the urban poor over the past few decades through political, spatial and civic interventions and resistance but also erodes the basic rights to life, shelter and livelihood, despite being guaranteed to all citizens of India under its Constitution.