India, April 12 -- A spate of articles on cleaning the Yamuna appeared around the Delhi assembly elections in February. Among the solutions talked about was the treatment of sewage till it attains the mandatory, tertiary treatment level discharge standards. Capital and technology for this solution are readily available, and now, so is the political drive. Given these drivers, the river water ought to achieve bathing quality in the near future.

However, the single-minded focus on pollution of the river has resulted in a tunnel vision, where the critical issue of adequate flow in the river doesn't attract similar fervour of action. The inadequacy of flow has, along with pollution and colonisation of the floodplains, destroyed many forms of...