Every few days, while most of the city is still wrapped against the cold, a small group of young people gathers on the banks of the Tawi with gloves, sacks and a stubbornness that the river has done little to reward. They are there to pull trash out of Jammu's lifeline, week after week, and they have been doing it for long enough that the showing-up has become the point. As 2025 winds down, their quiet persistence is one of the more hopeful stories the city has.
A river worth fighting for
The Tawi is not just water on a map. It is the river the city was built around, woven into its festivals, its mornings and its sense of itself. It is also, by any honest measure, under strain, choked in stretches with plastic, household waste and worse, including biomedical refuse that volunteers say they have hauled out by the bagful. Youth-led efforts under the broad banner of saving the river have kept up regular bank cleanups over many months, refusing to let the problem fade quietly into the background.
The work is unglamorous and frankly a little thankless. A stretch cleaned one weekend can be littered again by the next. But the volunteers keep returning, and in doing so they keep the river visible, refusing to let the city look away.
Beyond the cleanup
The picture is not entirely bleak, and it is not all on the young. Civic and forestry agencies have run large plantation drives along the Tawi riverfront, drawing officials, NGO volunteers, swachhata champions and students together to put saplings in the ground and signal that the river's health is a shared responsibility. The most meaningful change tends to come where citizen energy and official muscle pull in the same direction rather than past each other.
As one young volunteer put it, you do not clean a river to finish a job, you clean it so the city remembers the river is still there and still worth saving.
For anyone who wants to help, the entry point is low: bring gloves, wear shoes you do not mind ruining, and simply turn up to a drive. The cold is not an excuse, the volunteers will tell you, it is just weather, and a brisk morning by the water is honestly a fine way to spend it. The Tawi has carried this city for generations. The least a winter weekend can do is carry a few sacks back the other way.
