City: Ludhiana

This article is part of our special series Environmental Sustainability & Climate Change in Tier II cities supported by Climate Trends. The life sustaining character of the Sutlej river has changed drastically in recent years. Symptomatic of Sutlej’s sorry state is the Buddha Nullah, a 14-km stream that runs through Ludhiana, picking up toxic effluents in massive quantities and around 200 MLD of untreated sewage a day,  in its passage through the city before dumping it all in the Sutlej.  Sutlej which originates at the Mansarovar lake in Tibet, flows through Himachal Pradesh and Punjab covering a distance of 1450…

The Clean Buddha Nullah programme, which had become a symbol of the extreme apathy shown by successive governments towards citizens raising this issue for years, seems to have received a much-needed impetus. “The Buddha Nullah issue had been in a state of limbo for the past 30 years,” said Jaskirat Singh, State Executive Committee Member of the Naroa Punjab Manch (NPM), a citizen body formed to highlight issues related to water pollution. “It was around the time the Citizen Matters story appeared that we formed the Naroa Punjab Manch and since then we have been actively taking it up with…

Jagraon, a small township about 50 kilometres from Ludhiana Railway Terminus, has nothing much to distinguish it from other such towns on National Highway 5, except for an infamous, but very important bridge named after it. Till July 14 2016, when it was barred for traffic by the Railways, the original British-built Jagraon bridge, along with a parallel single lane bridge built in 1970 to accommodate the increasing traffic, was the lifeline for commuters in Ludhiana, Punjab's largest city and industrial hub, which once led to the city being bestowed with the title, Manchester of the East. Built as simple…

Buddha Nulla, or Buddha Dariya as it was once known, is a symbol of all that is wrong with Ludhiana, Punjab’s largest city. Old timers in Ludhiana remember a cool seasonal stream, a tributary of river Sutlej, that flowed through the city and rejoined the river 16 kms downstream. "It was I think in 1977 or 78, I was in class seven,” recalls Arun Chatwal, born and brought up in Ludhiana. “Both banks of the Buddha Dariya used to be a place for social gatherings. My father used to take all of us as kids there, and some of the…