India, July 17 -- There used to be a major fair along the riverbank every September. Its main attraction was pottery utensils made from the soil of the river. After the river became a drain, the livelihood of potters who made the utensils has disappeared," says Acharya Ravishankar, a schoolteacher in Panditpur village of Uttar Pradesh's Ayodhya district. He is referring to the Tilodki Ganga river, on whose shores the village is situated.

A seasonal river originating during the monsoon in Panditpur, the Tilodki Ganga is now extremely polluted and referred to as a drain in revenue department records. Local residents say that during land consolidation from the 1960s to the 1980s, parts of the river were recorded as non-agricultural land and...