A 1,200-foot-long sari, vedic chants and offerings of milk and honey into the Yamuna marked a festival in nearby Mathura even as the Taj Mahal city of Agra was seething with anger over water shortages.

As thousands of devotees of Hindu god Krishna celebrated the Yamuna Divya Chunari Mahotsava here Sunday, residents in Agra spent the last week protesting against the supply of polluted water from the river.

Officials said the chlorine content in the century-old Agra waterworks is now 140 ppm (parts per million) against normally accepted standards of 10 ppm.

"It is almost as if there is cancer dropping from the taps," a furious local newspaper recently screamed in outrage against the rising pollution levels in the Yamuna, the source of water for Agra.

The Central Pollution Control Board, the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board and several other agencies have declared the Yamuna a health hazard and its water unfit for human consumption.

"Even bathing in the river could cause diseases," warned a pollution expert.

With such alarms being raised all around, Agra residents clearly found the Yamuna celebrations in Mathura ironic. 

According to participants, a colourful sari was displayed on a row of 40 boats at Mathura's Vishram ghat before being symbolically offered to the river.

Priests poured milk and honey into the river amid chanting from holy scriptures.

"Devotional songs were sung. So intense was the faith of the people and their love for the river that the scene seemed celestial," chorused participants Kapil Kant, Deena Nath and Ram Bhavan.

Roughly 50 km away, the mood has been different in Agra.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started protests, blaming the state government for the city's water problem. The protesters burnt effigies of Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav.

"Where is the water in the river? What is flowing is untreated industrial effluents from Delhi and Haryana," said Shravan Kumar of the Yamuna Foundation for Blue Water, which is campaigning for a clean up of the river.

Agra's water problem is centuries old. The Mughal rulers, who invested in a big way in the city, had to move their capital to Delhi because of water shortage.

This scarcity has aggravated over the last few decades because of the pollution and drying up of the Yamuna.

Agra district officials, however, said Wednesday that the quality of the river's water would improve soon as arrangements had been made to get 50 cusecs of water from the Ganga canal flowing in the state.

But environmental activists said this was at the most a temporary solution. They called for an alternative water supply from the Chambal river, through the Chambal lift irrigation project 40 km from the city.