Yet there is little political pressure in India to clean it up.
Mar 28th 2019
Round
and round the baggage carousel at London’s Heathrow airport goes a battered
cardboard box waiting to be claimed by its owner, a passenger from Delhi:
“PLEASE KEEP THIS SIDE UP! GANGA JAL—HOLLY WATER.” For many Hindus the world
over, nothing is more holy or pure than Ganga jal, or water from the
Ganges.
The
whole river—from Himalayan glaciers across the vast North Indian plain to the
filigree delta on the Bay of Bengal—is worshipped as a life-affirming goddess.
The spiritual potency comes not from the Ganges’s 2,500km length, which falls
short of the world’s longest rivers. Rather, its basin supports half of India’s
population of 1.3bn (plus nearly the entire population of Nepal and much of
Bangladesh’s). For its water and fertile sediment, no river is more important
to humanity. And so for centuries Ganga jal has marked births,
weddings and deaths. Scores of cremations take place daily on the riverside
ghats in the city of Varanasi alone. Between January and early March, a
temporary city sprang up on the banks of the river near Allahabad (recently
renamed Prayagraj) for the Kumbh Mela festival, in which a staggering 240m
devotees took to the river to wash away sins and human ailments.
Yet the Ganges is likelier to add
to the ailments than cure them. For decades, declining water volumes have been
a growing worry, as hydropower dams have proliferated, wanton irrigation and
industrial schemes have drawn water away and the annual monsoon has become more
fickle. Three months before this summer’s monsoon, the Ganges is a thin
meander, much of its bed exposed, as it passes through Kanpur, the biggest city
along its course.
Low flows not only harm the
livelihoods of fishermen and farmers downstream. They also degrade water
quality. Sewage is pumped raw into the stream. Levels of fecal coliform
bacteria are off the chart. Tests from the Yamuna, a tributary which flows
through Delhi, have found 1.1bn such bacteria per 100 millilitres—nearly half a
million times the officially recommended limit for bathing. No wonder “Delhi
belly” is so prevalent. Victor Mallet describes in “River of Life, River of
Death” how the Ganges system appears to be a conduit for bacteria increasingly
resistant to antibiotics.
Alarmed at the state of the
Ganges, some holy men have spoken out. In October G.D. Agrawal, an
environmental engineer turned guru, fasted to death as a protest. Despite such
dramatic gestures, too few Hindus accept that the Ganges’s holy waters are
sullied. Civic pressure to clean up the river remains slight.
To his credit, Narendra Modi, the
prime minister, declared a clean Ganges a priority when he came to power in
2014. It was a nod to his Hindu-nationalist following. He promised $3bn and new
plants to treat sewage and industrial waste. Five years on, progress is disappointing.
In Varanasi, the focus is on razing a rambling old quarter to provide vistas
for visiting vips, rather than on cleaning up the
river.
As for Kanpur, a city of
Dickensian leather factories, the picture is dystopian. The river stinks. It is
not just sewage that goes untreated into the Ganges, among whose pools children
play. So, too, do effluents from the 300-plus tanneries, most notably chromium,
a toxic heavy metal. When Banyan visited, the tanneries were supposedly closed
to spare bathers at the Kumbh Mela 200km downstream. Yet in one ancient
factory, huge wooden vats were still turning, and workers were carrying
slopping buckets of chemicals around. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Kanpur’s
poorest live in slums drawing groundwater laced with chromium, which is known
to cause cancer, liver failure and early dementia. Kanpur has facilities to
recycle industrial wastewater and extract the chromium. The process is said to
add no more than nine rupees (13 cents) to the cost of a pair of shoes. Yet a
blind eye is turned to environmental breaches.
Too often, says Shashi Shekhar, a
former senior water official, state governments and their business cronies are
more interested in constructing treatment plants than ensuring their long-term
use. New forms of public-private partnership may start to bear fruit in a few
years’ time, Mr Shekhar predicts, and water quality at last improve. Yet deeper
change is needed. The Ganges is abused in search of short-term gain. Meanwhile,
neither politicians nor the press lay out the scale of the environmental
problem. As Mr Shekhar puts it, if a river in which millions of devotees bathe
“is full of shit, then people are required to be told”.
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