The river Yamuna, a major tributary of the Ganges, comes down to Delhi from the Himalayas. Its been coming down for over 50 million years , running its banks during the monsoon , swollen with water and depositing sands on its floodplain. This sandy layer on top is now about 40 meters deep and 100sq km in area - that's a lot.

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Take an equal amount of river sand and water in two identical glasses and start pouring the water into the sandglass, watchfully. Half the water  glass can empty into the sand. No surprise – sand and gravel are great for water storage – they are aquifer material.

The Yamuna river floodplain in Delhi is about a 100 sq km in area and on average 40 meters deep. It can the hold a lot of water  - about 2 billion cubic meters.

Can we use this?  Hydrology tells us that we may pull out over a third of this, near 700 – 800 million cubic meters. But, how do we recharge the floodplains.  Earlier there were annual floods during the monsoon, which recharged the floodplain. Now there are only decadal floods.  Even so, Nature has the answer. The monsoon  still brings down about 4 billion cubic meters of water down river  – from July to September. So, we  have the natural storage in this floodplain and plenty of water to fill it every year. We just need a scheme to pull the water out of this giant aquifer and recharge it with monsoon water. Put a barrage upstream and close a barrage downstream and embank the rest of the  floodplain and inundate it till the sand below saturates and we are ready to go. This is huge  - it can take care of the half the  water needs of  the city. It is non-invasive. Preserve and Use every year – nature’s gift.

The Yamuna floodplains are an immensely valuable natural resource. The floodplains could be preserved and non invasively used as a  natural storage of excess monsoon waters and yield a harvest of Rs 8000 crores of water every year. The Commonwealth games village will inaugurate the high end marketing and destruction of this invaluable resource at a few crores for one of the 1100 apartments being built. The efforts of the citizens and several scientific studies to stop this are still to have any effect.

It is with this in mind that we are building this site on urban natural resource in a city inflating way beyond its carrying capacity; to make the citizens aware of these resources and their immense value and enable them to protect their heritage.