Janak Daftari returns to the Mithi, one last time

MUMBAI: On Sunday evening, Janak Daftari returned to his beloved Mithi, as family and close friends gathered to immerse his ashes in a rivulet of Powai Lake, which flows into the Mithi River. Daftari, who died on February 27 at 74, had spent the last decades of his life striving to revive the river – making this final tribute a fitting one for a man so deeply connected to its waters.

An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, Daftari was one of the first to identify the mismanagement of the Mithi as a key factor behind the devastating floods in Mumbai in 2005. “My father worked in computer hardware and peripherals till the late ’90s, till he was taken in the early 2000s by the work Rajendra Singh, the ‘Waterman of India’, was doing in reviving rivers,” says Irshad. “Immediately, he gave himself to it, entirely.”

Daftari began by introducing the topic to the IIT-Bombay alumni group, whose monthly meetings he would organise, says RTI activist Shailesh Gandhi. “I remember him being an out-of-the-box thinker,” he said.

Irshad says his father launched the NGO Jal Biradari and also ran a sustainable wastewater treatment business. But his moment arrived in 2005, when Mumbai found itself drowning during an especially heavy spell in the monsoon. “The connection was very clear to him,” says Rohit Somani, a friend of Daftari’s since 2001 and an IIT-Bombay alumnus. “If you constrict the flow of the river, it will find a way to break out and reclaim its space.”

Daftari soon joined the battle from the field to the courts starting 2006, teaming up with petitioners environmentalist Jagdish Gandhi and Vanashakti’s Stalin D in the Bombay High Court. They had a laundry list of grievances against the authorities, the BMC and MMRDA included: the many battery recycling units, tanneries and automobile garages encroaching on the river’s banks that discharge effluents into it, constantly narrowing the width of the river.

The MMRDA’s boundary walls along the river was another bone of contention, which attempted to tame the river’s flow, constricting it. “It was due to him (Daftari) that I joined the PIL as a co-petitioner,” says Stalin. “The courts ordered the retaining walls demolished, but it was never done, and the case now languishes before the Supreme Court.”

Rishi Aggarwal, environmentalist and co-founder of Mithi Nadi Sansad, also a friend of Daftari, remembers their Mithi Yatra in 2009. Starting at the river’s origin in Mumbai’s Vihar Lake, the yatra followed its 17-km path till its exit into the Arabian Sea in the Mahim bay.

Stalin admits that the wins have been few, especially when up against state agencies, for whom the Mithi, despite its role as Mumbai’s lifeline, is hardly a priority. It would have pained Daftari to see the tendering for the third package of the Mithi River rejuvenation project in the works by the BMC, including a 7km-long retaining wall.

Jagdish Gandhi, long-time friend and environmentalist, says with a bittersweet sadness, “The (Mithi revival) movement dissipated over time because, despite the many orders we got in favour of the river, none of them has been implemented. The authorities continue to have their way, but none of them understands the behaviour of water.”

Despite these realities, both Irshad and Somani describe Daftari as the “eternal optimist.” “He believed in doing the work, regardless of the outcome,” says Somani. “Even if he did not have a decisive victory,” says Irshad, “his efforts paid off in other ways – in raising awareness of the Mithi’s state, of expanding the movement. He was an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. My personal hero.”