Saving the #Ganges

With so much being written about cleaning the Ganga, I am fairly positive that I probably would not have anything new to contribute to the discussion. The NDA Government has been taking about it, and it seems that high level meetings and discussions have indeed begun in earnest, and there have been time bound commitments made by the political leadership.

The Ganges rejuvenation has been a key project of Narendra Modi, and multiple stakeholders have emerged who want to be a part of it, or have at least begun speaking about it. The Honourable Supreme Court recently pulled up the Government, asking them to show a plan to clean the Ganges, and that given the current pace of clean-up, it would take centuries for the river to be clean.

While there may have been a tinge of sarcasm in the Honourable Court’s voice, a more believable reality could be that the Ganges may not even survive till the end of this century.

It is expected that this government, under Modi, means business and would be a much more active government than its predecessor. In addition, in only a few months since coming into power, the Prime Minister has been leading India’s foreign relations from the front. Even as the Prime Minister is busy preparing himself for Xi Jinping’s arrival, a number of India’s traditional, and not so traditional partners, have offered their services and expertise for helping clean up the river.

The British Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, on his recent short visit to India offered Britain’s services, sharing their experiences from cleaning up the river Thames. As the Deputy PM rightly points out, the Thames flows through one of the largest cities in the world. However, it remains to be seen whether the Ganges, over 2000 kilometers long, with over 500 million living in its basin, can use the same solutions that helped the much, much smaller Thames.

Israel, now one of India’s traditional partners, is branching out of its role as our defence supplier, working on various issues such as agriculture. The Israeli Government, it seems, has already contacted their Indian counterparts with some proposals.

Globally, rivers are in decline. The Ganges has been identified as one of the ten most endangered rivers of the world by the WWF as far back in 2007, a list that includes other mighty rivers such as the Nile, the Yangtze and the Indus. Its fair to assume that India is not the only nation where its rivers are dying. India is not alone in following the global development pattern where development is synonymous with extraction, production and consumption.

The environment had been providing us plenty till a few decades ago, and it is only now that this whole pattern of development is being questioned. Unfortunately, humankind is hooked to this version of development, and it makes the task of weaning away towards a more sustainable model even more difficult. Why should our citizens be deprived of driving a nice car and using the latest gadgets, ask the developing nations.

As I have always believed, and I am not being very original when I say so, the Ganges cannot be resurrected without the active support, willingness and action from the people that depend on it. As I have already mentioned, it has one of the largest basins in the world, and supports millions of people directly and indirectly, by supplying water for everything from electricity to agriculture to drinking to manufacturing. Recently, the Prime Minister met with his key minsters and called upon the need to make the Ganges rejuvenation a mass movement.

Recently, the the Water Resources Minister, Uma Bharti, released a website that brings together all the Government schemes on cleaning the river.

The task of cleaning a mega river is firstly, not, and cannot, be bound by deadlines, secondly, the causes of its pollution are too many and far spread, and thirdly, the myriad of solutions that are required, keeping in mind the human complexities and necessities, ensure that this will be a very tough, and demanding task. This is not the first time that the task of cleaning the mighty river has been taken up. Thousands of crores have been poured in, and the Ganges has only gotten more polluted. A task of this scale will require nerves of steel, because I anticipate a huge opposition to many of the things that I believe are critical for this project.

The small industrial units linked across the length of the river would not want to spend extra to install equipment for effluent treatment, stack emissions or waste management, for example. The country has numerous laws on dealing with industrial waste and pollution, but these are largely disregarded by most industrial units because of lax enforcement, and corrupt authorities.

Similarly, lack of urban planning, low or nil sewage systems, and greatly underwhelming sewage treatment capacity have ensured that most of the human waste generated, right from the very mouth of the river in Uttarakhand, goes into the river as it is.

In my line of work, we often repeat – what cannot be measured cannot be managed. Measuring and monitoring of all industrial, agricultural and human activity in the Ganges basin is essential. Millions of litres of untreated sewage and effluents are poured into the river, and the Environment Minister, Prakash Javadekar announced recently that polluting industries along the river will be measured 24x7.

I find myself spiritually, environmentally and socially linked with the Ganges. I have always found peace on her shores, seen her at Devprayag, where the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda become the Ganga, and at Kolkata, where the Hoogly is about to enter the ocean. I worry for the many species that it supports that are on the brink of extinction because of human activity. If this has to be done, the time is now.