The first public gestures that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made on his election were to thank two mothers — his own and Mother Ganga, the most famous waterway in India.
The new leader visited his mom, then went on to Varanasi along the Ganges, India’s most threatened river, where under a canopy brightened with marigold flowers and cheered by his constituents as millions watched on television, Modi promised the sacred river would be clean in five years.
“Mother Ganga,” Modi solemnly declared on the banks of the river where Hindu pilgrims believe a dip washes away sins, “needs someone to take her out of this dirt and she’s chosen me to do the work.”
The Ganges is no ordinary river. It originates pristine from a Himalayan glacier 3,048 meters (10,000 feet) high, worshiped as a goddess, reverently called mother. Yet raw sewage from 29 cities blights its 2,525-kilometer (1,570-mile) route as bloated bodies of dead animals, funeral pyre ashes, reduced flow from dams and factory waste fouls its waters.
The task to clean India’s most revered river by the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth is daunting, and echoes a promise uttered almost three decades earlier by the late Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi.
Yet it’s not insignificant that Modi made his first policy announcement about water. Nor on the day he assumed power over Asia’s third-biggest economy, he named a minister just to clean the river. Uma Bharti’s title: Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation.
‘Holy dip’
Unlike his efforts to cleanse the smaller Sabarmati River in western Gujarat state, where he was chief minister, the Ganges is far more challenging to Modi’s government: improve water for 400 million Indians across five of the nation’s most populous states, address groundwater risks, aquifers depleted by farmers and boreholes, and rising arsenic contamination.
“If we don’t clean this river now, we’re risking a huge public health crisis,” said Somnath Bandyopadhyay, former consultant to the Indian environment ministry’s National Ganga River Basin Authority.
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The Ganges is no ordinary river. It originates pristine from a Himalayan glacier 3,048 meters (10,000 feet) high, worshiped as a goddess, reverently called mother. Yet raw sewage from 29 cities blights its 2,525-kilometer (1,570-mile) route as bloated bodies of dead animals, funeral pyre ashes, reduced flow from dams and factory waste fouls its waters
“From pathogens to endocrine disruptors, the water is deteriorating faster than we can understand,” Bandyopadhyay said. “At places like Varanasi, we are taking a holy dip in the sewage of various upstream cities.”
Fecal coliform
In a seven-kilometer stretch at Varanasi alone, untreated sewage dumps from 33 outlets into the Ganges, according to Pandit Vishwambharnath Mishra, head priest and chairman of the city’s Sankat Mochan Foundation.
Water samples tested in a lab by the “Clean Ganga Campaign” showed fecal coliform of as much as 1.5 million counts per 100 milliliters at the confluence of the Ganges and Varuna River, named after the god of water.
The tolerable limit for bathing is less than 500 of the bacteria that can cause such diseases as typhoid, dysentery and cholera, said Mishra, a Banaras Hindu University professor and among those Modi met before he announced his Ganga plan.
Pesticides in India’s groundwater are causing cancers, dirty water is inhibiting growth in children and lack of the resource for irrigation has caused farmers to take their lives.
Arsenic poisoning has risen as too much groundwater is withdrawn by pumps and wells in the plains of the Ganges, polluting crops and generating lesions, gangrene and cancer-related illness, according to the Central Groundwater Board.
In India, 53 per cent of the people have no access to a basic toilet and defecation along water bodies is common. At least 37.7 million a year are affected by water-borne diseases that costs up to $600 million to treat, according to WaterAid.
Read more here: Infrastructure issues, sewage treatment, floods and landslides.
