The endeavour is to resurrect  the spiritual and cultural legacy attached to the Vedic heritage river and to restore its  glory enshrined in scriptures

Ajay Bharadwaj
A momentous exercise is underway in Haryana to retrieve the lost vestiges of epical Sarasvati river in Haryana. The entire track of about 210 kms, mapped  through satellite images and archaeological evidences, has been earmarked to give shape to the ancient river that is long lost, but finds a frequent mention in ancient scriptures of Bharat, including the Vedas.
The endeavour apparently is to resurrect  the spiritual and cultural legacy attached to the Vedic heritage river and to restore its  glory enshrined in scriptures.
There are almost 90 villages in Yamunanagar, Kurukshetra and Kaithal distrcits where the Vedic river is worshipped. The region is dotted with temples whereever the river traces are found and people make ritual offerings.
In a major initiative, the Haryana government recently renamed Mustafabad town in Yamunanagar district as Sarasvati Nagar after some traces of the Vedic river were found there.
Near Rohalaheri village in Yamunanagar when fresh water stream was struck just seven feet below the surface, it became a pilgrim spot for the locals. Hundreds of people would throng the spot to take a dip and worship the stream that they believe would not be anything else than the river Sarasvati.

A similar scene was witnessed in nearby Mughalwali
village where the discovery of a similar reservoir enthused the locals take to worshipping the stream.
Assembly Speaker Kanwar Pal Gurjar had inaugurated the excavation work of ‘Sarasvati Revival Project’ at Rullaheri village in Yamunanagar district in April last year.
After inauguration, the District Development and Panchayat Department had undertaken digging work in two-and-a-half-km area.

The delighted people of the village offered prayers to Goddess Sarasvati and distributed sweets amongst themselves and workers involved in the digging work.
“The water is potable, fresh in taste and sweet,” said  District Development and Panchayat Officer Gagandeep Singh, who is coordinating the Sarasvati Revival Project. He said  the river length in Yamunanagar district would be 55 km.
Earlier, the plan was to dig the river till seven feet deep down. “However, now, we are planning to dig it till 10 feet deep for good natural flow of water, “ he said adding that the  river would pass through 43 villages of the district.

A good number of Sarasvati temples dot the land through which the state government has charted the course of river Sarasvati, meandering through more than 200-odd villages in the state.

The Haryana Sarasvati Heritage Development Board set up in 2016, proposes to build a divine tourism circle along the course of the river that begins from Adi Badri in Yamunanagr district and goes on till Gimredi village in Sirsa before finding its way into Ghaggar on its way to Rajasthan and Gujarat. Between Haryana and Punjab, though it zig-zags at four points before taking the final course through the Ghaggar.
The entire project, for which Haryana has earmarked a budget of about Rs 50 crores, envisages not just digging a channel, but involves a massive task of cleansing a major part of it in Kurukshetra, Kaithal, Fatehabad and Sirsa districts where sullage is cast recklessly.

In Yamunanagar the task of digging channels from Rohlaheri village to Jageri village started way back in 2008. While the Soma creek has been a link between Adi Badri, supposed to be the point of origin  of the River Sarasvati,
Yamunanagar district has about 67-km long stretch of the river to be excavated , of which the officials have dug upto 48 kms. But suddenly the work has come to a halt because in as many as 13 villages, through which the Sarasvati river is supposed to pass, the pieces of land are in private hands. “People are not ready to part with their pieces of land because prices offered to them are not lucrative enough. We are making efforts to convince people on religious and cultural grounds to part with their land”, said a senior official.
Officials feel once the Sarasvati river is formally notified by the state government, it would be easy to persuade people to evacuate their land for the purpose.
District Development and Panchayat Officer (DDPO) Gagandeep Singh, who has been a nodal officer for the project in the district for the last many years and is credited with performing the Herculean task of digging the river course, admitted that there had been some hindrances like that.  But he was optimistic about tiding over all such problems in near future.
He said  the Sarasvati revival project had multi-dimensional aspects such as water conservation, water harvesting, ground water recharging, flood protection, improvement in ecological balance, flourishing of flora and fauna and development of eco-tourism, recreation tourism and pilgrim tourism.
Besides installation of pollution treatment plants, over a dozen tube wells would be made operative to make the stream run pure and constant.
Vice-chairman of the Board Prashant Bhardwaj said all relevant maps of Sarasvati River available with the Survey of India, satellite images maps from ISRO, palaeo channel maps from ISRO have been obtained the record purposes.
The complete alignment of Sarasvati River and its tributaries from Adi Badri to river Ghaggar Sarasvati  have been identified and demarcated as per the revenue record.
In addition, an execution plan for stopping all type of waste waters into the Sarasvati River is getting ready while a feasibility report for the construction of a dam and a barrage on the Somb creek  at Adi Badri is underway..
He said the board has been also harping on international collaborations for development of model village on the bank of the river Sarasvati and also for revival and rejuvenation of the Sarasvati river heritage spots.
“All this would promote divine tourism in the region and would inspire people to revive and rejuvenate the Vedic river culture in the context of the present times”, the vice chairman added.
As many as 20 bridges have been under construction in Yamunanagar and, Kurukshetra districts over the river and its creeks.
Arvind Kaushik, SE, attached to the Board said two legislations are in the pipeline. One is to ensure that people in nearby villages did not dump sewerage or industrial waste in the river, and two, in order to evacuate people who have encroached on embankments of the river downstream.
The notification for the River Sarasvati would be made by the state government soon, after which  demarcation  of the river course would be made along the route in Haryana, he added.
He said another significant work in the pipeline has been development of palaeo channels of the river. “We need to identify and quantify water in  the channels to have an exact estimation of underground flow of water”, Kaushik said.
Last year in July the state government formally set the Sarasvati river flowing when about 100 cusecs of water was discharged into it at Uncha Chandna village in Yamunanagar. The water was channelised from the Yammuna through the Shahbad barrage and would flow downstream upto 14 kms.
In order to ensure that the river flows perennially, the government proposes to construct three dams on the Shivaliks. One will be at Adi Badri, another at Lohgarh and the third at Haripur.
The flow of water will be regulated at these dams to ensure a continuous flow to the  Sarasvati.
In fact, after water was found while digging the dry river bed at Yamunanagar that the Haryana government had made claims to  having found the lost Vedic  river. A senior official clarified that the state government had never claimed  that the Sarasvati would be  flowing over the ground. The mythical river’s  undercurrents are present till date and to identify them services of the ONGC have been requisitioned. .
As per the revenue records, on around 150- km stretch of land the river used to flow ages ago. The official said if the underground fail to help revive the flow, the government would divert surplus water from Yamuna river to link it to the Sarasvati. In the long run it might help twin purposes of restoring the depleting undergound water levels as also to avert floods in the region.
A number of committees have been constituted to look after the various aspects of the project such as establishment of digital library, tourism circuit etc, while a new circle named as Sarasvati Heritage circle at Kurukshetra has been established with its division offices at Yamuna Nagar, Kurukshetra and Kaithal for overall planning and execution of the Sarasvati Heritage Development project.
Earlier, the move to revive the mythical river was  taken up in 2002 during the tenure of the first NDA government under Sh Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The then Union tourism and culture minister, Jagmohan, had initiated an exercise to collect and identify the underground course of the river.
He had constituted a committee of four experts including a scientist from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Ahmedabad, an eminent archeologist and a glaciologist. The committee was asked to explore excavation from Adi Badri to Bhagwanpura in Haryana and in the second phase from Bhagwanpura to Kalibangar on the Rajasthan border. The committee was also entrusted with the task of exploring and  deepening of two wells, which according to mythology, were associated with the Pandavas.
A remote sensing study conducted by the Geological Survey of India had also found existence of palaeo channels on the west of the Aravalli range and it was believed that these could be part of a river system ending in the Rann of Kutch.