New Delhi: Thousands of dead fish were seen floating in the Yamuna River near North Delhi’s Burari on Wednesday evening, with fishermen alleging that a similar phenomenon has been observed every few months in the area for the last few years.
Ranjan Mukhiya, a 32-year-old fisherman, told ThePrint that dirty water suddenly flowed into the Yamuna at around 9 pm last night near the spot where they often go fishing.
“We watched the fish die in front of us. We have taken videos and shared them with people,” Mukhiya said.
The fishermen have been witnessing such fish deaths for the past three years, sometimes every two or three months, and sometimes more frequently, every two weeks. They claim that the water flows down from Panipat, Sonipat, and often they even get calls from fishermen upstream to warn them that fishes in their area have already begun dying out.
Mukhija said that he can tell by the smell of the river that something is wrong. Within hours, the Yamuna’s waters turn brackish and smell like sewage, he added.
“The dead fish eventually just flow away with the water and maybe 20 out of every 100 fish survive. For us, this means almost no work for about one to two months. Many of us have to return to farming when this happens,” Mukhiya said.
Members of the New Delhi Nature Society shared videos of the dead fish on X alleging that the deaths might be linked to chemical waste discharged from Haryana through canals. Ever since they had been informed by fishermen of such deaths, they had been on alert to collect the river’s water the next time this happened. One of the society’s founders Verhaen Khanna has collected samples of the dirty water and is trying to get it tested to find out what toxins are leading to the death of the fish.
Vimlendu Jha, an environmentalist whose work has centred around the Yamuna for several years, says there is no mystery in the death of these fish.
“The deaths are caused by extremely low dissolved oxygen levels and the effluents that are released into the waters. Even though the froth and such dead fish might be visible at times, the state of the river is terrible throughout the year. The lack of environmental flow, or fresh water supply, along with discharge from treatment plants makes this situation worse,” Jha told ThePrint.
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Nothing new
This mass death of fish in Burari comes hardly a few months after hundreds of fish had died at Sanjay lake in east Delhi during a heatwave earlier this year. Experts have pointed out once again that high temperatures, pollutants, and a decline in dissolved oxygen can make aquatic conditions deadly for fish.
While the cause of the Burari fish deaths remains to be established, the deaths themselves are proof of the ecological stress and deteriorating water quality the Yamuna is facing.
Activists are particularly alarmed because such incidents come against the backdrop of the Delhi government’s claims that the Yamuna had been cleaned enough that people could sip its water during rituals of Chhatt Puja.