On the Ganga

We can send a shuttle into space, we can build the [new] Delhi Metro. We can detonate nuclear weapons. So why can't we clean up our rivers?

—Rakesh Jaiswal, Environmental Activist since 1993

The time has come to leave my beloved Varanasi, and to be honest it is TIME!! The Ganges plain is no place to be in the summertime, and radiating heat has thoroughly affected my brain and almost all of my decision making capacity. I was lucky to have enough wits about me to have booked a train to Rishikesh (not much cooler, but) a convenient spot to visit some of the most holy places of pilgrimage for Hindus in the Himalayas. From Rishikesh I will take a bus to Uttarkashi, the last stop off before the Gangotri glacier. Gangotri, the source of the mighty Ganges, is still closed for the season, the road packed in ice (ahh, ice!) so I will make my way in that direction and wait for the first thawing to occur so I can dip in the frigid, (clean) glacial water.


In reporting from India, I often have to resist the temptation to make grand statements, to wallow in the depravity of the human condition here, or to extol its merits too much. Basically, to wax cliche, for each statement their exist strong contradictions, and sometimes my tendency to notice the poverty can lead to seemingly unending questions and zeal that is not always realistic or productive. But India is home to a third of the world's poor, and the massive issues that come with that fact cannot be ignored. Sometimes I want to cry when I see old women stooped in the streets of Varanasi, begging alms and dressed in tattered rags. I can't help but wonder how someone can spend so many years on this earth and end up in this condition - old and sick, begging in the filthy streets and living out of garbage heaps. Where is there justice for the incredibly hard lives of the poor? For the sake of myself and those who are interested in India, I try to not to see and discuss poverty only (for India has many faces), and keep my tirades mostly to myself. But to look at India one must take into account its many contradictions, and they are often not sweet to the eyes or ears. Basically, poverty is not sexy. And perhaps one of the great contradictions in this wildly confusing country is the state of the sacred river that runs through the northern part of the subcontinent: the Ganges. In turning away from the nastier truths that one confronts here, too many people ignore the reality of the current condition of a river that has sadly become an appropriate symbol of the discord between ancient Indian philosophy and modern day practices.


The Ganga is putrid at this point in its 1,600 mile trip across the teaming plains to Calcutta. Although the water is not black like the Delhi Yamuna (which has been devoid of any life for at least a decade), the waste levels are alarming. In Varanasi, the coliform bacterial count (from human and animal waste) is at least 3,000 times higher than the standard established as safe by the United Nations world Health Organization. The extreme pollutions affects the lives of roughly 400 million people along the banks of the Ganges, who also add to the the nearly 1 billion liters of untreated sewage that enters the water every day. Well-intentioned but poorly implemented programs do exist in the form of the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) but, as in many developing countries, the environment has taken the back burner to India's push towards industrial production and policy laxity for textiles and leather production (the largest industrial pollutants of the river). In addition to the sewage and industrial chromium, one can easily see how many bodies are dumped into these holy waters each day, mostly as remains from the ever-burning creamation ghats. But apart from bits of skull and breast plates, children, pregnant women, sadhus, and people dying from cobra bites are not allowed to be burned, and so they are wrapped in cloth, tied with stones, and dumped in the river. At a time with the water is so low, one can imagine the effect on the environment.

In the Ramayana (a sacred Sanskrit epic written roughly 400 years before Christ's birth), Lord Vishnu declared, "Man becomes pure by the touch of the water, or by consuming it, or by expressing its name." There is no doubt that Varanasi is a special place, a site of prayer since a time when other ancient civilizations like Mesopatamia and Demascus were thriving, and because of their faith, millions of people partake in ritual baths each day on the banks of this environmental tragedy. Many Hindus refuse to accept that the river has become a source of illness, deformities, and high infant mortality, and because they have no other options, people continue to use and destroy their beloved resource. Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and Hindu priest who's led a campaign there to clean the river for two decades, expresses his concern for Hindus. "They want to touch the water, rub their bodies in the water, sip the water," he said, "and someday they will die because if it." This issue, like most, involves all of the other intractable problems associated with poverty - lack of health, sanitation, basic education - which makes it seem like another impossible cause in India. But problems like poverty do not disappear on their own, and in a country with a population growing by approximately 1,815 people every hour, environmental issues like this one need to be discussed and addressed by the central Indian government, however unsexy they may be.

—Excerpts from "A Prayer for the Ganges" by Joshua Hammer;

Smithsonian; November, 2007; pages 75-82.