ABSTRACT
The new millennium rolled in with structural changes in our planning system, and a new approach for pursuing urban development to retrofit the old and upcoming cities into ‘world-class smart city’ has been designed as an imperative pathway to sustainable development. Changes in power structure and ideologies, especially with the new rich, overwhelmingly concentrated in the metropolitan cities, are exercising greater control over media and politics in the new ‘urban era’. Urban rivers have been the focal point of infrastructure projects in the Western world for a long time, but the twenty-first century has brought such projects to the East as well. Many new and innovative river projects which are inspired by the Western world find place in the new urban landscape in Indian cities. The riverfront development (RfD) project is one such urban infrastructure project. The riverfront development projects (RfDPs) taken up simply as infrastructure projects steadily acquired the overtones of environmental conservation, preservation and the act of giving back to nature. This chapter is a critical evaluation of these river restoration/river rejuvenation projects in India, and how they are destroying the fragile waterscape of already stressed rivers.
