These dangerous levels of pollution do little to deter religious practice from the sacred river. Those that practice these rituals may become spiritually clean, but the pollution of the water afflicts thousand with diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, and even typhoid each year. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.
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Share Flipboard Email. Subhamoy Das. Updated April 12, Cite this Article Format. Obama told Modi that the river in his native Chicago, once so filthy it used to catch fire, was now a place where fish were caught and eaten. By then — piqued by s photographs showing weekend dinghy sailing in Delhi on a Ganges tributary that is now a fetid open sewer — I had already made it a mission to discover what ailed the river and why, and had decided to see as much of it as I could from source to mouth.
Good scientific data, especially on industrial pollution, are scarce in India. Portrayed in Indian legend as a natural paradise of lilies, turtles and fish enjoyed by the flute-playing Krishna and his adoring gopis, almost all its waters are now diverted above the capital for irrigation. First, the sewage. The reason is clear. The CPCB says only a tenth of the sewage produced along the main stream of the Ganges is treated at all.
It is small wonder that those who can afford it use high-tech water filters to ensure the cleanliness of their drinking water, or that more than , Indian children under five die each year from diarrhoea, many of them in the Ganges basin. NDM-1 was first detected in Delhi drinking water in , and David Graham, a Canadian environmental engineering professor at Newcastle University, told me that he, as a visitor to India, and I, as a resident of Delhi, were both likely to be harbouring NDM-1 in our guts.
The rise was correlated with increases in faecal bacteria, too, suggesting that poor sanitation was once again the cause of the contamination. It is a grim irony that urban Indians who come to pay homage to the Ganges end up dirtying the river and spreading exposure to life-threatening diseases across the country.
The second problem is industry. He adds that more research is needed now into the vegetables themselves.
Even for the main stem of the Ganges, there is little information about the scale of the crisis. One obvious way to grasp the effects of human waste and industrial toxins is to compare locations upstream and downstream. The contrast was startling. In the hills near Marchula, the Ram Ganga flows clear and fast, home to fish eagles and otters. Stand on the bank and you can see golden and silver mahseer fish swimming in the pools and hear the harsh bark of the sambar, a type of deer, from among the trees.
Anil Kumar, a guide and ornithologist from the village of Bakhroti, perched high on a hillside, points to tiger footprints, the dung of wild elephants and a pool where he caught a 68kg catfish two years ago. I jump in for a swim and wash off the grime of the long journey by car and on foot from Delhi. In a village above the river, Basanti Devi — who thinks she might be about 50 years old — complains that wildlife is too abundant, with elephants destroying the vegetable crops and tigers occasionally eating a cow.
The descent to the plains of Uttar Pradesh at million, the state has as many inhabitants as Brazil is a shock. By Indian standards, Moradabad is not a particularly large city — just one million people — but there is no sewage treatment and there are scores of paper mills, sugar plants, brass foundries and plastics factories nearby that spew waste into the Ram Ganga and its tributaries. Downstream of the city centre, the sandy banks and the exposed riverbed present an apocalyptic scene of filth and garbage, of dead dogs, plastic bags, nullahs drains spewing pink dye and pigs rootling through the muck.
All the while, men with tractors and bullock carts are mining sand for construction, while dhobi-wallahs washermen ply their trade in the dirty water and a boy forlornly casts his net for fish. In the Lal Bagh district, men and women squat in the shallows swirling the waste ash from the foundries in deep bowls to recover tiny remnants of metal. We had been told that the panning of incinerated electronic waste is done here at the dead of night — it is illegal because of the known toxicity of many of the components — but at least one boy is openly panning his e-waste in the daylight to extract wire and other valuables.
As he speaks, someone hurls a plastic bag of rubbish from the walls of the nearby Ganga Mandir, a Hindu temple, straight into the river. All the sewage from the city comes into the river. But things should change once the sewer line is laid. But I want my children to bathe in it. Near the Hastinapur wildlife sanctuary, between Haridwar and Kanpur, it is almost possible to imagine what the Ganges was like in its stately progress across the north Indian plains before the industrial revolution, the building of dams and the population explosion.
We encounter a cheerful crowd of pilgrims, waving flags, blowing trumpets and carrying brass pots of river water as they return from their prayers to Ma Ganga. Ducks and waders feed in the shallows while river turtles and endangered gharials, the thin-snouted crocodiles of the Indian subcontinent, bask on the sandbanks. The industrial town of Kanpur is another story. So vile is the effluent from its tanneries — including dyes, salts, acids and chromium compounds — that the government temporarily shut them down for the Kumbh Mela downstream in Allahabad.
I was among the tens of millions who bathed in the Ganges at this Hindu festival, reputed to be the largest gathering of humans on earth. A few years back he helped the Blacksmith Institute, a non-profit group that tackles pollution, to protect a Kanpur community of 30, from hexavalent chromium — Cr VI — in their groundwater. Known to cause lung cancer, liver failure and premature dementia, Cr VI had been found at a concentration more than times the Indian government limit.
The sacred practice of depositing human remains in the Ganges also poses health threats because of the unsustainable rate at which partially cremated cadavers are dumped. In Varanasi, some 40, cremations are performed each year, most on wood pyres that do not completely consume the body.
Along with the remains of these traditional funerals, there are thousands more who cannot afford cremation and whose bodies are simply thrown into the Ganges. In addition, the carcasses of thousands of dead cattle, which are sacred to Hindus, go into the river each year.
While industrial pollutants account for a smaller proportion of contamination in the Ganges, the health and environmental impacts of toxic chemical waste can be far greater. From the plains to the sea, pharmaceutical companies, electronics plants, textile and paper industries, tanneries, fertilizer manufacturers and oil refineries discharge effluent into the river. This hazardous waste includes hydrochloric acid, mercury and other heavy metals, bleaches and dyes, pesticides, and polychlorinated biphenyls—highly toxic compounds that accumulate in animal and human tissue.
Runoff from farms in the Ganges basin adds chemical fertilizers and pesticides such as DDT, which is banned in the United States because of its toxic and carcinogenic effects on humans and wildlife. Damming the river or diverting its water, mainly for irrigation purposes, also adds to the pollution crisis. Rivers need fresh infusions of water to dilute and dissolve pollutants, and water flow is necessary to flush material downstream.
In , the government of India launched the Ganga Action Plan, which was devised to clean up the river in selected areas by installing sewage treatment plants and threatening fines and litigation against industries that pollute. Almost 20 years later, the plan has been largely unsuccessful. The Western-style treatment plants simply did not meet the needs of the region. A key criticism is that local communities, those most invested in the health of the river, were not included in the planning process.
In collaboration with engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, Mishra proposed an alternative sewage-treatment plan for Varanasi compatible with the climate and conditions of India. Just as important as V. They found new ways to talk about the river that respect the Hindu worldview and veneration of the Ganges.
For example, workers in Varanasi now pick up litter along the riverfront and remove corpses and animal carcasses from the river. Despite the achievements in Varanasi, the clean-up campaign must be a national effort, touching all parts of the river, if it is to be successful.
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