The River That Became a Drain: Bharalu and the Death of a Memory

RAHUL ROHAN PAUL

There is a photograph that does not exist anymore, except in the memory of old men who grew up on its banks. In it, a boy dives into clear water near Rajgarh, while his friends wait their turn on the bank, and a few boats carrying rice and areca nut move lazily downstream toward Bharalumukh. That boy could have been Bhupen Hazarika. He often spoke of swimming in the Bharalu as a child, of a river that had not yet learned to be ashamed of itself. Today, no one dares dip a toe into that same water. The river that the Bard of the Brahmaputra once played in is now a 52 mg/l BOD nightmare, so starved of oxygen that the Central Pollution Control Board lists it among the most critically polluted river stretches in the entire country.

This is the story of how that happened, and why it should matter to anyone who calls Guwahati home.

Before it had a number: the Bharalu of memory: The Bharalu was never the Brahmaputra’s equal in size, but it was, for centuries, its quieter accomplice. Born in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya and entering the city under the name Bahini, it cuts through Basistha, Beltola, Dispur, Ganeshguri, and Rajgarh before turning west, crossing G.S. Road at Bhangagarh, and finally surrendering itself to the Brahmaputra at Bharalumukh. A sister rivulet, the Basistha, breaks away from the same source and feeds DeeporBeel, the wetland that Guwahati still depends on for its biodiversity.

Until around 1970, the Bharalu carried fresh water that people actually drank. Professor Kalyan Das, director-in-charge of the OKD Institute of Social Change, who grew up beside it in the 1970s, remembers a river clean enough to play in, where villagers came in for the fish during festival season. Boats moved on it. Children swam in it. It was, in the truest sense, a river not yet a euphemism for a drain.

Then came the Guwahati Refinery. Oil began leaching into the water, fish started dying, and a generation that had once dared the current began to keep its distance. By the mid-1980s, conservationists mark the river’s quiet but decisive turn from waterway to waste channel. What took centuries to become a river took barely two decades to become a problem.

It is worth pausing on what a river actually does for a city, because the loss is rarely counted until it is irreversible.

A healthy river is a flood buffer. The Bharalu once absorbed and carried away the city’s monsoon runoff naturally. Today, choked with plastic, silt, and encroachment, it does the opposite — it backs up and floods the very neighbourhoods it once protected. Guwahati’s notorious waterlogging during the monsoon is, in no small part, the Bharalu’s revenge for being treated as garbage.

A healthy river is also a living system. Fish, aquatic insects, frogs, and the birds that fed on them once depended on its waters. With dissolved oxygen levels close to nil for most of the year, the Bharalu today can barely support bacteria, let alone fish. The food chain that the river anchored has simply collapsed in its stretch through the city.

And a healthy river is groundwater’s quiet guardian. Heavy metals like lead, along with arsenic and chromium, have been detected seeping from the Bharalu’s sediment into the groundwater aquifer beneath Guwahati, a city where a significant share of the population still depends on groundwater for drinking. The pollution does not stay in the river. It travels underground, into wells, into bodies.

This is what “the river became a drain” actually means in human terms: lost flood protection, lost biodiversity, and a slow, invisible contamination of the water beneath our feet.

The numbers are not abstract. Around 39 drains empty directly into the Bahini-Bharalu system, carrying untreated sewage from a city that, remarkably, still has no comprehensive sewerage network of its own. Household waste, septic tank overflow, hospital effluent, and industrial discharge all find their way into the same channel that once supplied drinking water.

In 2018, the CPCB classified the Bharalu as a Priority-I polluted stretch as the most severe category  with a Biological Oxygen Demand of 52 mg/l against a safe limit of 3 mg/l. Of the 44 polluted river stretches identified across Assam, the Bharalu sits alongside the Borsola and Silkaso as the worst offenders in the state. A decade after the CPCB’s first warning, independent reporting has found the river’s condition essentially unchanged. The National Green Tribunal ordered the Assam Pollution Control Board to draft a restoration plan, which led to a proposal for decentralised sewage treatment plants along the drains feeding the river. The Bharalu River Restoration Project followed. Both remain hostage to the oldest Indian bureaucratic ailment: a plan exists, funding does not quite follow, and execution moves at the pace of silt settling on a riverbed.

Civics is the missing tributary: It would be convenient to lay his entirely at the government’s door, and a great deal of the blame does belong there in inadequate sewerage infrastructure, slow disbursal of restoration funds, and years of half-measures. But a river dies by a thousand small permissions. Every household that connects a sewer line directly into the Bharalu instead of a sanctioned outlet, every hospital that finds it cheaper to dump untreated waste than to treat it, every shop owner who lets plastic waste drift toward the nearest drain;  these are civic failures, not just administrative ones.

This is, in the end, where civics and government must move together rather than waiting on each other. A restoration project announced from Dispur means little if Guwahati’s residents continue treating their nearest drain as a free disposal service. And public vigilance like citizens demanding that the sewage treatment plants promised after the NGT order actually get built is the only real pressure that turns a five-year-old action plan into an actual cleaned riverbed. The Bharalu will not be saved by a single notification. It will be saved, if it is saved at all, by the unglamorous coincidence of enforced regulation and a citizenry that stops using it as a sewer.

The river in our songs, before it became a statistic: What makes the Bharalu’s decline sting a little more is that Assamese literature and music have rarely treated rivers as scenery. They have treated them as kin.No one did this more completely than Bhupen Hazarika, whose entire body of work returns again and again to the Brahmaputra as something closer to family than geography.

In “Luitor Parore Aamar Desh,” he sang, “Luitor parote janam amaar, paniyei pitri, shakti amaar”  we were born on the banks of the Luit, water is our father, our strength. In “Bistirno Parore,” composed under the influence of Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River,” he turned the Brahmaputra into a silent witness he interrogates directly, asking why it flows on so indifferently while the poor and the powerless continue to suffer on its banks. In “Aji Brahmaputra Hol Bahniman,” the river becomes a mirror for a society in turmoil during the Assam Agitation capable of both creation and destruction, exactly as Assam itself felt in that decade.

This is the literary and musical inheritance the Bharalu is quietly excluded from today. It is hard to write an anthem to a drain. A river that once fed festivals, fish, and childhood memory has been reduced, in the span of two generations, to a footnote in pollution-control reports studied for its Biological Oxygen Demand rather than remembered for what it gave a city. As one recent piece on the river’s decline put it bluntly: search for the Bharalu online today, and the very first thing you are told about it is how polluted it is. No other story survives the search results.

That is the real tragedy buried inside the chemistry. A river that Hazarika’s generation could have written songs about has instead become evidence in an environmental case study. Assam’s literary tradition has always known how to mourn a river in trouble; the dualities, the destruction, the indifference of moving water are old themes here. The Bharalu deserves that same elegiac attention before it is gone for good, not just from city planners, but from the people who still, however rarely, walk past it and remember what it used to be.

Solutions and Restorations:The technical fixes are, by now, well understood and not particularly mysterious: decentralised sewage treatment plants at the major drain outfalls, enforcement against direct sewer and septic connections, regular desilting and dredging, and a citywide sewerage network that Guwahati has somehow managed to do without for decades despite being the largest city in the Northeast. None of this is exotic engineering. It has been done on far larger and more polluted rivers elsewhere in the country, however imperfectly.

“What is missing is sustained will; civic and political, together. A river that takes fifty years to die from neglect can, in theory, take far less time to recover if treated seriously. But every year the Bharalu remains a Priority-I stretch is another year further from the river that an older generation of Guwahati still remembers playing in as children, and further from ever again being the kind of river an Assamese songwriter might choose to sing to.”

RAHUL ROHAN PAUL, DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM, TEZPUR UNIVERSITY

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