Editorial: The story of a river and a city

CHENNAI: The Revanth Reddy government of Telangana is touting the Musi Riverfront Development Project (MRDP) as an ambitious effort to clean up the river, beautify its banks, and revive the city’s foundational romance with the water body.

On paper, it sounds good. This, after all, was once a river that Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah, the city’s founder, used to swim across to meet his lover. It is now a sewage line. The chief minister wants to transform this odorous riverfront into a landscape of parks, promenades, and shopping plazas.

However, Revanth Reddy’s dream has run into an obstacle that is common to every inner-city development project in India: the displacement of people who live there. Every large-scale riverfront or rejuvenation project taken up in urban India has been an eviction drive disguised as development.

Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati riverfront saw the eviction of more than 10,000 families. The Yamuna restoration effort in Delhi forced thousands into resettlement with little thought to their livelihoods. Now, the Musi project is following the same script.

Along the project’s 55 km stretch, government surveys have identified over 10,000 households that will have to be removed. Officials say these structures lie within the riverbed or the buffer zone and face the risk of flooding.

The first phase of demolition targeted 1,600 households and sparked strong protests from the affected people. The Telangana High Court intervened to direct the government agencies to conduct a socioeconomic survey and prepare a proper rehabilitation plan.

The government’s response has been to announce that two-bedroom houses — given the spectacularly Orwellian name of Dignity Houses — would be built for the affected families, but 22 km away from their original location. This is typical of riverfront project bureaucracies.

Instead of giving anything like serious attention to the livelihood anxieties of the to-be-displaced households, the project documentation speaks the language of enterprise, beautification, and investment. It’s a glossy-brochure vision that has no understanding of how a poor family can make a living when torn from its sustaining ecosystem. Officials speak of “rehabilitation” as if it were merely a question of logistics.

While pushing the displaced towards deeper precarity — longer commutes, reduced access to schools, uncertain access to drinking water — riverfront projects fail to answer a fundamental question:

Why should the burden of a city’s aesthetics fall on those who can least afford it? This is the product of an arrogant imagination that riversides are meant for princes to cavort with lovers, that they are wasted on fishermen. Hyderabad’s foundation myth stems from such a fantasy.

The dream of a riverbank with jogging tracks, moonlit promenades, and gourmet cafés satisfies the lazy bureaucrat’s idea of enterprise, while the sight of auto drivers, daily wage-earners, scrap collectors, and domestic help seems like a tiresome burden on the state.

MRDP is a delirium, not a plan. The project is being rushed through without public consultations or a detailed project report while claiming impressive benefits to the city’s economy and environment.

It pretends to make the Musi smell good while having no great plan to treat the sewage, effluent, and stormwater that comprise much of its flow within the city. Any claim that the river will be freshened up without taking up major works upstream is just a cover for what is patently a project for profit.