what is the silt brought down by the rivers by Himalayas
Answers
Rivers are again in the news, though so far only for symptomatic reasons. The new government at the centre has renamed the charge of water resources minister to Minister of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation. There is fundamental contradiction within this name plate and we have in fact yet to see this nameplate.
There is also a lot of discussion about rejuvenation of Ganga, with the Prime Minister promising the people of Varanasi Parliamentary constituency that he will rejuvenate Ganga. There is no clarity about how he plans to go about in achieving that. His claim during elections that Gujarat Government’s Sabarmati Riverfront Development provides a model for this is clearly a non-starter. Sabarmati has water only in 10.4 km of the river stretch that flows through Ahmedabad. If you go upstream of this stretch, you will find a dry river in most non-monsoon months and if you go downstream, you will find a river more polluted than Yamuna in Delhi. And even the water that one sees in this 10.4 km stretch is not the water from Sabarmati river basin, but is taken from Narmada River via Sardar Sarovar Canal! Pertinently, Ahmedabad or Sabaramati has no right over that water: the Sardar Sarovar Project has been built and justified in the name of Gujarat’s drought-prone areas like Kutch and Saurashtra.
The nameplate-changing business also extended to Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, its name changed to Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, though here again the new nameplate is yet to be seen. Unfortunately, all the noises that we have heard so far from this front seem to give primacy to growth rather than environment or forests or climate change! The new environment minister has yet to say anything about river protection, but he is already talking about river linking!
So is there a hope for rivers in this new establishment, going beyond the symbolic name changes? Here one is reminded of a meeting, where one of us (HT) was invited a few months before the elections, to discuss the state and fate of Yamuna River in Delhi. When HT started speaking, he started by asking what is a river? Is it just a source of water as engineers see it? Following a sudden change in program, Sushri Uma Bharati was the chief speaker at the meeting and when it was her turn to speak , she actually tried to understand that question and tried to find an answer to it: what is a river? Her becoming the Union Water Resources Minister also raises hopes since she had been campaigning for Aviral Dhara (Continuous flow) of the Ganga and against building of dams and hydropower projects in Uttarakhand. We hope that she will realize that impact of dams and hydropower projects on rivers is similar, if not same everywhere.
Ms Bharati is also minister of river development and Ganga Rejuvenation. The question, What is a river? becomes even more relevant in that context. A river is possibly the most complex ecological entity and we still do not understand fully how to define a river. But here we would like to highlight that river is a lifeblood of the ecology and carries so much more than water. One of the key elements that river carries is silt or sediment (although there is a slight difference between the two, we will use it interchangeably here).
The rivers carry silt from various points in their journey from the hills, to the deltas where most major rivers meet the sea. In this journey, the type, quantity, movement of silt varies with place and time. The silt comes in various forms, from suspended matter to fine silt to coarser sand. It is the transfer of silt from upper catchments to the plains that helps build fertile and alluvial flood plains like the Indo Gangetic plains
Explanation:
The rivers carry silt from various points in their journey from the hills, to the deltas where most major rivers meet the sea. ... It is the transfer of silt from upper catchments to the plains that helps build fertile and alluvial flood plains like the Indo Gangetic plains.