Hell flows along the River Ganga
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On a single day, April 19, Eco-Friends fished 60 floating corpses out of the 10-km stretch of the River Ganga in Kanpur. What then is the progress of the ambitious Ganga Action Plan?
On April 19, the eve of Sattu Amavasya, a bathing festival, volunteers from Eco-Friends fished 60 floating corpses out of the 10-kilometre stretch of the River Ganga in Kanpur. This is a clear demonstration of the apathy with which the sacred river continues to be treated. As a British Sky One Channel crew captured the event on camera, the progress – or lack of it -- of cleaning the river under the ambitious Ganga Action Plan became all too evident.
“Be under no illusion that it happens on auspicious occasions only,’’ cautions Rakesh Jaiswal, Executive Secretary of Eco-Friends. Since this civil society organisation started its campaign to clean the Ganga in 1997, it has extracted some 1,000 human corpses from the short stretch of the river in Kanpur alone. Extrapolate this data over the years and across the length of the river, the picture that emerges is gruesome and tragic.
Along with an estimated daily load of 1.5 billion litres of untreated sewage, the Ganga ferries thousands of half-burnt corpses that are put into the river to ensure spiritual rebirth. The result is deeply ironical: the ancient symbol of purity has become a great open sewer along much of its length. When the 15 th-century poet Kabir wrote of the Ganga, ``hell flows along that river, with rotten men and beasts”, few would have believed that his impious lament would one day be true.
“The harsh truth is,” laments Jaiswal, “that though the campaign has succeeded in garnering the vital support of local communities who live along the river, the concerned government agencies have looked the other way.” But under this growing apathy and the pressures of burgeoning population, the Ganga’s incredible cleansing capacity seems to be giving up. Today, in the basin of a half-billion souls, purification and pollution swim together in unholy wedlock.
While inability to afford the cremation expenses accounts for one-third of the floating corpses, another one-third is entirely due to the strong belief that immersing the dead brings moksha or salvation. Ironically, the remaining one-third is composed of those unclaimed bodies that the police conveniently dump into the river. It is an unbelievable commentary on the manner in which dead humans and the living river gets treated.
As the river moves centre-stage in the proposed $120 billion project for the interlinking of rivers, a la Ganga-Cauvery link, the transferred waters to the south will have to ferry these pollutants as well.
“Reassurance that the river will be cleansed of its incredible pollutant load before the proposed interlinking gets underway must be taken with a pinch of salt,’’ cautions Jaiswal. If the million-dollar Ganga Action Plan could not clean the river a bit in the past two decades, what success will this mega-venture have? The river is more polluted now than it was when the project was launched two decades ago.
Even the flesh-eating turtles released in the Ganga to consume the dead bodies have failed to make any significant impact. Released into a stretch of river at Varanasi in the late-1980s, poaching may have accounted for a better part of their promised appetite. Far from replicating the bio-control measure in other areas, the project seems to have fallen flat owing to increase in pollutant concentration vis-à-vis reduced flow in the river.
Myth has it that goddess Ganga descended to earth in the form of a river, to fuel life into 60,000 sons of the ancient ruler King Sagara, who had been burned to ashes by an enraged ascetic. If the Ganga originally came to bring salvation to Sagara’s 60,000 sons, the poor goddess has ended up with a burden 10,000 times greater than she bargained for. It is for the people of peninsular India to decide whether they would share the burden, should the interlinking of rivers come true!
--- Formerly with the World Bank, Dr Sudhirendar Sharma is a water expert attached to the Ecological Foundation in New Delhi. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
InfoChange News & Features, May 2004