Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., campaigned on promises of transforming India into a prosperous, vibrant modern society, a nation of bullet trains, solar farms, “smart cities,” and transparent government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in May of 2014, is the latest to try. Official estimates of the amount spent on this effort vary widely, from six hundred million dollars to as much as three billion dollars every attempt has been undone by corruption and apathy. Indian governments have been trying to clean up the Ganges for thirty years. The Ganges absorbs more than a billion gallons of waste each day, three-quarters of it raw sewage and domestic waste and the rest industrial effluent, and is one of the ten most polluted rivers in the world. Below its confluence with the Yamuna River, which is nearly devoid of life after passing through Delhi, the Ganges picks up the effluent from sugar refineries, distilleries, pulp and paper mills, and tanneries, as well as the contaminated agricultural runoff from the great Gangetic Plain, the rice bowl of North India, on which half a billion people depend for their survival.īy the time the river reaches the Bay of Bengal, more than fifteen hundred miles from its source, it has passed through Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna, Kolkata, a hundred smaller towns and cities, and thousands of riverside villages-all lacking sanitation. What’s left of the river is ill-equipped to cope with the pollution and inefficient use of water for irrigation farther downstream. This is the starting point for hundreds of miles of irrigation canals built by the British, beginning in the eighteen-forties, after a major famine. Instead, the waste is taken to an open dump site, where, after a heavy rain, it washes into the river.Ī hundred and twenty miles to the south, at the ancient pilgrimage city of Haridwar, the Ganges enters the plains. Like most Indian municipalities, Uttarkashi-a grimy cement-and-cinder-block town of eighteen thousand-has no proper means of disposing of garbage. The first significant human pollution begins at Uttarkashi, seventy miles or so from the source of the river. The towering hydroelectric dam at Tehri, which began operating in 2006, releases a flood or a dribble or nothing at all, depending on the vagaries of the season and the fluctuating demands of the power grid. Its banks are disfigured by small hydropower stations, some half built, and by diversion tunnels, blasted out of solid rock, that leave miles of the riverbed dry. In 1615, Nicholas Withington, one of the earliest English travellers in India, wrote that water from the Ganges “will never stinke, though kepte never so longe, neyther will anye wormes or vermine breede therein.” The myth persists that the river has a self-purifying quality-sometimes ascribed to sulfur springs, or to high levels of natural radioactivity in the Himalayan headwaters, or to the presence of bacteriophages, viruses that can destroy bacteria.īelow Gangotri, the river’s path is one of increasing degradation. The sixteenth-century Mogul emperor Akbar called it “the water of immortality,” and insisted on serving it at court. To hundreds of millions of Hindus, in India and around the world, the Ganges is not just a river but also a goddess, Ganga, who was brought down to Earth from her home in the Milky Way by Lord Shiva, flowing through his dreadlocks to break the force of her fall. Indians living abroad can buy a bottle of it on Amazon or on eBay for $9.99. Women in bright saris wade out into the water, filling small plastic flasks to take home. Some swallow mouthfuls of the icy water, which they call amrit-nectar. Eleven miles downstream, gray-blue with glacial silt, it reaches the small temple town of Gangotri. The Ganges River begins in the Himalayas, roughly three hundred miles north of Delhi and five miles south of India’s border with Tibet, where it emerges from an ice cave called Gaumukh (the Cow’s Mouth) and is known as the Bhagirathi.
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