The Political Ecology of the Rejuvenated Yamuna Initiative, Delhi

This thesis challenges the technocratic framing of the rejuvenated Yamuna initiative in Delhi's Chilla Khadar area by adopting a political ecology framework. Through this lens, the tensions, and intricacies among various environmental perspectives within the waterscape come to light. Employing a situated ethnographic study, the focus on the conflicting environmentalisms of small-scale farmers and politico-legal institutions unveils the interplay of power dynamics, trade-offs, interests, and values. By politicising the discourse, this study questions the strategy of displacing small-scale farmers to establish biodiversity parks as part of the Yamuna River rejuvenation. This thesis provides deep critical insights into how various environmentalisms relate and compete by addressing three main research questions: What power dynamics are at play in the Yamuna floodplains? What is the nature of the environmentalism of the farmers and how does this relate to the environmentalism practised in the rejuvenated Yamuna initiative? How do the dispossessed negotiate, navigate, and compete under the rejuvenated Yamuna initiative? To answer these research questions, I use ethnography to analyse the socio-ecological complexity within transforming Yamuna waterscapes in Delhi, from historical farming, to brief concretisation, to now the creation of bio-diversity parks. Contributing to the theories of bourgeois environmentalism and the environmentalism of the dispossessed, this thesis demonstrates the multiplicity of environmentalisms that exist in this space, decentring the unjust solutions imposed by the state and the judiciary that are dominantly framed to be singular. Through the political ecology framework, the original contributions emphasise that while the current rejuvenation plans attempt to move beyond the prioritization of 'Western scientific' knowledge, they still perpetuate existing power imbalances, neglecting voices intimately connected to the river's life and livelihood. The application of solutions in an apolitical and technical manner, rooted in unjust neoliberal systems, exacerbates socio-ecological degradation. Farmer resistance in official and unofficial spheres, however, opens new and more equitable avenues for comprehensively addressing the broader degradation of the river basin.