Saving Mother Ganga
For
twenty years, a group of priests, scientists and concerned citizens
has been fighting to clean up India's holiest river. Now, they stand
on the brink of success.
The morning light
struggles through the hazy atmosphere of the Indian plains, warming
and welcoming the teeming thousands who already line the banks of
the River Ganges at Varanasi. Pilgrims stand waist-deep in the dark
water, a gentle mantra fluttering on their breath as their hands cup
together and offer water to the rising sun. Men scrub themselves from
head to toe in soap as their wives preen their silken hair and share
a little gossip. Legions of dhobi-wallahs pound lumps of sodden cloth
with sticks, or whirl wet saris through the air like samurai weapons.
Each of them considers it a privilege to purify themselves in the
water of India’s holiest river; little do they know, they may
also be endangering their lives.
I watch this spectacle unfold from a leaky old boat, accompanied by
a scientist from Varanasi’s river monitoring laboratory. As
a dozen naked children laugh, splash and leap a few metres away, my
companion reaches over the side and lifts up a flask of murky water.
“The dissolved oxygen level here is zero,” he says. “That
means nothing can live in the river.” He gestures downstream,
where a few small villages lie beyond the edge of the city. “The
people of these villages have their groundwater contaminated. Jaundice,
dysentery and skin diseases are common.” With a look of sadness,
he seals the flask and turns the boat back upstream. “Mother
Ganga is very sick.”
Every
Hindu dreams of bathing in the holy Ganges; they believe it is the
mother of all life and one dip can wash away a lifetime of sin. Varanasi
is the most popular pilgrimage destination on the river; every year
hundreds of thousands of devotees come to the city’s ghats (riverside
platforms) to bathe in the river. But all is not well with the Ganges.
Today, 500 million people (half of India’s population) live
in the river’s basin; water-treatment infrastructure is overwhelmed.
In Varanasi alone, sixty thousand bathers, millions of gallons of
untreated sewage and numerous corpses find their way into the river
each day. Bacteria levels in the water are 3000 times over the safe
limit, so high that all oxygen is sucked out of the water, choking
out other life. Water-borne diseases are increasingly prevalent; already
some two million Indian children die each year from hepatitis, dysentery,
typhoid and cholera.
It was statistics like these that first set Professor Veer Bhadra
Mishra on his personal crusade to save the Ganges. Professor Mishra
was head of the department of engineering at Varanasi’s University,
but also priest of its second most important temple. Increasingly,
he found himself torn between his religious beliefs in the purity
of the sacred river and his scientific knowledge of the severe pollution.
“There is a struggle and turmoil inside my heart,” says
Professor Mishra. “The day does not begin for me without the
holy dip. But at the same time, I know the condition of the water
is not good.” In 1982, he established the Sankat Mochan Foundation
(SMF), a local organisation dedicated to investigating the source
of the pollution in Varanasi and eliminating it.
He
discovered that the problem was acute, but not intractable. “Discharge
of sewage causes about 90 per cent of the pollution. Perhaps 10 per
cent comes from people using the ghats. Once you stop the sewage flow,
within a few months the river should return to normal.” Yet,
this simple solution became the subject of over two decades of political
wrangling between India’s central government and the SMF.
The struggle began with the launch of the first Ganga Action Plan
in 1986. This government scheme spent five billion rupees (£100
million), with the aim of cleaning up the Ganges from source to mouth.
Varanasi got three new sewage treatment plants and pumping stations.
In April 1993, with great fanfare, the government announced that the
river was clean and moved on. However, Dr Mishra was not so easily
convinced; the SMF’s laboratory was still finding pollution
levels unchanged.
“The work the government did was very dependent on electricity,”
says Rohit Joshi, project coordinator of the Clean Ganga campaign,
“but there is a scarcity of electricity in this region.”
Daily power cuts stop the operation of sewage treatment plants, directing
untreated waste into the river, sometimes even backing up the city’s
ancient sewers and spilling raw sewage onto the streets. During the
monsoon, river flows become too high and the plants have to shut down
for over five months. Even on a good day, 50 million litres of raw
sewage find their way into the river.
It was not easy convincing people that the Ganges was still contaminated.
“The Ganga is a holy river and people have blind faith in its
purity,” says Mr Joshi. “If we were to say that the river
was polluted, some people might take offence…so we say that
Mother Ganga is sick.” Every day, with religious devotion, SMF
scientists have sampled the river water and reported their findings
to the government. To increase local awareness of the problem, they
established an environmental education centre on the riverside and
began outreach programmes in local schools and villages. Dr Mishra
has travelled the globe canvassing support, all the while wearing
his traditional priestly robes and carrying jars of Ganges water to
perform his daily rituals.
It took another seven years, but eventually the government was convinced
that the river needed further action. It allocated funds for a second
Ganga Action Plan, but its plan was merely to build more pumping stations
and treatment capacity. “It is the same technology that they
used in the first phase,” says Mr Joshi, “and it will
encounter the same problems – bypassing of sewage in the flood
season, dependence on large amounts of electricity.”
The SMF has since put together its own plan for the river. It would
use a gravity-based interceptor well along the Ganges’ west
bank to carry the sewage downstream to a treatment plant. The well
would work without the need for electricity, as would the four treatment
ponds that would decompose the waste naturally.
This alternative plan is supported by India’s Central Pollution
Control Board supported this alternative plan, whose report of February
2001 said it would cost less and produce a higher quality of effluent
than the government’s plan. At the same time however, the Ministry
of the Environment released a report supporting the government’s
plan, claiming that the SMF’s plan was, “far stricter
than the present effluent standards [leading to] much higher costs.”
The government still says its own scheme would be better for Varanasi.
Ultimately,
it will be a matter for the courts. The municipal corporation of Varanasi
unanimously chose the SMF’s proposal in May 1997, and India’s
constitution does place water and sewage management under their jurisdiction.
Local corporations of several riverside cities have since filed a
civil litigation to force the government to adopt the new plan. The
case is now with the Supreme Court and a final decision is expected
soon.
Dr Mishra and his colleagues are optimistic that their proposal will
succeed in the end. His respect and love for the river, and his role
as priest and guardian of the Hindu faith, make it impossible to accept
failure. “My campaign has been like a game of snakes and ladders,”
he says. “When it has gained speed, a snake has swallowed it.
But one day I’ll dodge all the snakes. Mother Ganga will help
me save her.”
If this day comes, it will have consequences that reach far beyond
Varanasi. The SMF’s struggle has become a test case for how
India handles its water supply. Already similar campaigns have grown
out of other cities along the river, such as Eco-Friends in Kanpur.
Every day, the government is finding its negligence challenged on
a new front.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: nothing will diminish
the worth of Mother Ganga in the eyes its worshippers; their faith
in its purity is unshakeable. As dusk gathers over the river, I watch
priests light ghee lamps and pilgrims float burning offerings with
unerring devotion. Four generations of India, from shrivelled, white-haired
grandmothers in silk saris to teenagers with mobile phones and Nike
trainers, gather around me to worship their holy mother in prayer
and song. Above them, written in large letters on the side of a temple
it says, “Blessed are those that live on the banks of the Ganges.”
With the help of Dr Mishra and others like him, this will continue
to be true.
