The National Cadet Corps exists to build character, discipline and selfless service in India’s youth — making it a natural bridge between the Armed Forces, our nation and the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. Within weeks of taking charge of NCC Delhi, I was fielding a stream of NGO requests for cadets to physically clean the Yamuna. I approved a few, then recognised the problem: NCR Delhi’s 52 km stretch of the river’s 1,376 km length causes 80% of the river’s total pollution, and volunteer clean-up drives were making no measurable dent in it — while quietly teaching cadets that “service” meant symbolic gestures rather than real impact. I stopped the practice.

I then ran a genuine root-cause study — meeting scientists, academics, published authors, NGOs and residents along the river — and reached a conclusion that mirrored what I’d seen in Kashmir, at Dal Lake and the Jhelum River: the Yamuna wasn’t dying from a sewage-treatment gap alone; it was dying because Delhi’s cultural relationship with the river had collapsed. No infrastructure-only action plan was going to fix a problem that was, at its root, a 1,000-year-old broken relationship between a city and its river.

I presented a strategy built on that insight, #NCC4Yamuna, to Ms Neera Misra of the Draupadi Dream Trust, who backed it immediately. The idea was to turn all 36,000 Delhi cadets into “Yamuna Rakshaks,” trained to rebuild that cultural bond rather than scrub riverbanks. She helped secure a meeting with Union Jal Shakti Minister Shri C.R. Patil, which we attended with Shri Ranjit Chaturvedi, a dedicated Yamuna advocate.

From there, cadets were trained as Rakshaks at annual training camps and sent out to spread the idea organically across the NCR — supported by an original song I wrote, and a video of it, directed by Pandit Manish Pandey and choreographed by Ms Geetanjali Singh. It was filmed across Delhi’s landmarks and carried the message “NCC Cadets have pledged to revive Yamuna Maa because Yamuna is not just a river, it is the tilak (adornment) of our forehead” far beyond anything a clean-up drive could reach.

The campaign’s credibility peaked when cadets Niharika, Darshan, Diksha and Zuha briefed the Vice President, the Delhi Chief Minister, the Chief of Defence Staff and all three Service Chiefs on #NCC4Yamuna Strategy at the January 2025 Republic Day Camp. Yamuna revival subsequently entered the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Delhi Assembly election manifesto. After the party’s February 2025 victory, Prime Minister Modi publicly called the Yamuna “Maa” — Delhi’s identity and culture — and the new Delhi Cabinet’s first official event was a Yamuna aarti. When the Prime Minister and Home Minister then called for a people’s movement to revive the river, that call validated the exact model 36,000 cadets had already built.

The lasting outcome isn’t a cleaner river alone — it’s a generation of cadets whose sense of discipline and seva is now permanently oriented toward Viksit Bharat 2047, not photo-op activism.