A few weeks ago, I drove past the stretch of the Rispana river near Ballupur. There is a stretch there — between two road crossings — where the riverbed is completely dry and has been built over with what appears to be semi-permanent structures: a workshop, a pile of construction material, a stretch of concrete where someone has started laying a foundation. A few metres further, where the water does still flow, it is the colour of something that should not be called water.

I have driven past this stretch dozens of times. Each time, there is something new on the riverbed. Each time, the river is a little smaller. Each time, I think someone must be doing something about this. Each time, I am wrong.

What We Are Losing

The Rispana and the Bindal are not large rivers. They are not the Ganga or the Yamuna. They do not feature in religious texts in the way that more famous rivers do. But they are Dehradun’s rivers — the waterways that determined where the city was settled, that once provided water and food and the particular sound of moving water that is one of the things a city near rivers should always have.

Old photographs of these rivers — from the 1970s, even the 1980s — show something that is difficult to reconcile with what exists today. Wide, clear channels. Flat stones on which people sat. Children swimming. The rivers were part of the texture of daily life in a way they no longer are for most of the city’s residents, who drive across them on concrete bridges without looking down.

The Development We Keep Choosing

Meanwhile, the city builds. A new mall opens on GMS Road. A multiplex where there was a field. A housing complex where there were trees. Flyovers that cut through old neighbourhoods. Each of these is presented as development — as the city growing, becoming modern, catching up.

But development that destroys the ecological infrastructure of a valley — its rivers, its groundwater recharge zones, its forests on the hillsides above — is not development. It is borrowing against a future that will eventually have to be paid for, and the payment will be in water scarcity, flooding, and an environment that cannot support the population living in it.

Dehradun is already paying some of these costs. The summer water crisis gets worse each year. Flooding in the monsoon has become more severe as river channels have narrowed and natural drainage has been disrupted by construction. The urban heat island effect is measurable in the temperature data. The connection between cause and consequence is not obscure — it is direct and documented.

What Could Actually Be Done

River restoration is not a fantasy. Cities across India — and across the world — have reversed the degradation of urban rivers when there has been political will and sustained civic pressure to do so. The Sabarmati in Ahmedabad is a complicated example, contested in its methods but illustrative of what intervention can look like. The Keni river restoration project in Mangalore is a smaller-scale but more ecologically sound model.

For Dehradun’s rivers, the minimum requirement is enforcement of existing rules: the riverbed encroachments must be removed, the effluent discharge must stop, and the buffer zones that are legally mandated around river channels must be restored and maintained. None of this requires new legislation. It requires the application of what is already on the books.

What it also requires is a civic culture that values the rivers enough to demand their protection. That culture exists in Dehradun — I have seen it in the residents’ groups that have documented the encroachments, in the journalists who have reported on them, in the activists who have filed cases. But it has not yet translated into the kind of sustained public pressure that makes politicians act.

The mall on GMS Road will still be there if we pause to ask what we’re building and what we’re destroying in the process. The Rispana river, if we wait much longer, will not be.