Three days after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant called unemployed youth “cockroaches” from the Supreme Court bench, some of those cockroaches showed up at one of Delhi’s most polluted river ghats, with brooms in their hands and placards around their necks.
Earth Warrior volunteers descended on Kalindi Kunj Ghat along the Yamuna in New Delhi, collecting plastic, clearing waste, and wearing signs that read, “I am a cockroach.” The cleanup drive was documented by Earth Warrior, an environmental volunteer group that has conducted weekly cleanups at the ghat for more than five years, and later posted on social media.
The Ghat They Chose
Kalindi Kunj is not an accidental location. It sits on a stretch of the Yamuna that environmental groups have described for years as among the river’s most contaminated.
Toxic foam floats in clusters at the ghat. Boatman Lambu, 70, who has lived his entire life along the river at Kalindi Kunj, said: “At one point, we would drink Yamuna’s water. Now it smells so bad you can’t even breathe here.”
Every day, around 800 million litres of untreated sewage and 44 million litres of industrial effluents flow into the Yamuna. Sixteen out of 37 sewage treatment plants in Delhi still fail to meet required quality norms, with the worst contamination concentrated in the Wazirabad to Okhla stretch — the very stretch where Kalindi Kunj lies.
Politicians have visited. Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta filmed at the ghat in October 2025, promoting chemical foam removal ahead of Chhath Puja. The foam returned within days. The cleaning completely disappeared.
Ashok Upadhyaya, CEO of Friends of Yamuna, a non-profit that runs cleanup drives and campaigns for the river’s ecological restoration, put it plainly: “Ministers come, pick trash, with cameras around them.”
Who Earth Warrior Are
Pankaj Kumar, widely known as Delhi’s Oxygen Man, leads Earth Warrior. A former IAS aspirant, Kumar left his job in 2022 to dedicate himself to environmental work. His team has conducted Yamuna cleaning drives at Kalindi Kunj Ghat for the past five years. Earth Warrior is not affiliated with any political party.
Beyond cleaning, the group files legal cases, audits sewage plants, and demands institutional accountability.
The Movement That Sent Them
The Cockroach Janta Party was founded on May 16, 2026, by Abhijeet Dipke, a digital content creator, one day after CJI Surya Kant’s “cockroaches” remark went viral from a Supreme Court hearing on fake law degrees. Within 24 hours, thousands had registered as members, and photographs of young people cleaning garbage dumps and water bodies while wearing “I am a cockroach” placards began circulating online.
The Kalindi Kunj drive was one of the first on-ground actions the movement produced. An unemployed generation — called parasites and pests by the country’s top judge — showed up to clean the river that decades of governance have not.
What the Budget Says
Delhi’s 2026-2027 Green Budget allocates Rs 22,236 crore to environmental initiatives, with the largest portion directed toward Yamuna cleaning through the Delhi Jal Board.
The river remains covered in foam. Saurabh Bharadwaj, Delhi AAP chief, challenged Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Water Minister Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma to drink one litre of water from Kalindi Kunj to judge how clean the Yamuna really is.
The cockroaches brought brooms.
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