Dhansiri River: A Silent Cry for Help Amid Pollution and Neglect

Time of India

11-06-2025

MUMBAI: There's a river in the North East that the rest of the country has forgotten. The Dhansiri, which threads through the hills and valleys of Nagaland and Assam, is not just a lifeline for those who live along its banks—it is also an archive of their waste.
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It carries with it traces of careless urban planning, unregulated sand mining, the aftertaste of pesticides, and the silent seepage of sewage. But now, for the first time, scientists are listening to what the river is saying, in all four seasons.
Led by Dr M. Romeo Singh from the Department of Botany at Nagaland University, a team of researchers spent a year travelling between the upstream serenity, the muddled middle, and the choked tail of Dhansiri.
What they found was sobering: in the peak of summer, when the river is thinnest and the heat cruel, its waters breach national and global health standards. Turbidity, total alkalinity, dissolved solids—each measure became a red flag waving from the river's surface.
By winter, the water rests and clears, as though it were briefly allowed to breathe.
Using the Weighted Arithmetic Index (WAI)—a more nuanced model that gives greater importance to the parameters most crucial to human health—the team developed a Water Quality Index (WQI) that paints an exacting portrait of decline.
In the downstream stretch, where urban runoff and religious offerings accumulate, the water was rated 'non-potable' in all seasons.
Dhansiri is not the Brahmaputra. It does not command headlines or policy attention. But it is a river of consequence—for the farmers who use it to irrigate, the women who wash their clothes in it, the children who wade into its shallows. For them, this is not just water. It is future.
'The study,' says Dr Singh, 'fills a critical research gap, not only because Dhansiri has long been overlooked, but because it models how science, policy, and community must intersect if we are to reverse ecological collapse.'
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His recommendations are not flashy: relocate waste dumps, ban direct discharge, invest in wastewater treatment, educate locals. But it's the quiet interventions, he says, that change the course of rivers.
If implemented, the measures could prevent disease, improve crop health, and bring back biodiversity that's been driven away by years of unchecked pollution. In later phases, the team hopes to expand the study to include biological indicators—fish, plankton, and microbial life—as silent storytellers of riverine health.
And to trace newer threats: heavy metals and emerging pollutants that don't float, but settle—and stay.
In 2022, parts of this work were published in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. But the story, Dr Singh insists, is not in the journal—it is in the river. Every drop is evidence. Every season is a plea. And somewhere in Nagaland, a river still runs—wounded, but not voiceless.