Murky
realities in clean Ganges
initiative By Sudha
Ramachandran
BANGALORE - India has signed
a deal for a US$1 billion loan from the World Bank
that will go towards an ambitious project, Mission
Clean Ganga, which aims at halting the discharge
of untreated sewage and industrial effluents into
the Ganga River (or Ganges) by 2020.
Given
the enormity of the challenge, many fear that the
massive infusion of funds could just result in
more money going down the drain.
The
roughly 2,500-kilometer-long Ganga originates in
the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas in India's
Uttarakhand state. It leaves the mountains at
Rishikesh and hits the plains at Haridwar, then
flows east through the states of Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar and West Bengal before entering Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh, where it is known as
the Padma River, it is joined
by the Brahmaputra; the two then go on to form the
world's largest delta before emptying their waters
into the Bay of Bengal.
Around a quarter
of India's 1.2 billion-strong population live in
towns and villages along the Ganga. They depend on
it for drinking water, irrigation and livelihood.
They also turn to it for spiritual sustenance.
The Ganga is worshipped by Hindus. They
believe that the goddess Ganga descended to Earth
through the matted locks of the deity, Shiva. A
dip in the Ganga is believed to cleanse one of all
sins. Thousands of Hindus are cremated on its
banks. People from across the country come to the
Ganga to immerse the ashes after the cremation of
their kin.
The holiest of India's rivers,
the Ganga is also among the world's dirtiest. If
in the upper reaches it is dams and mining and
stone crushing units that are choking it,
downstream it is untreated sewage - over 12,000
million liters of sewage pours into the Ganga
daily - as well as effluents from tanneries,
industrial waste and agricultural runoffs that
have reduced this sacred river to a dark, stinking
sewer.
A fecal coliform count exceeding 50
per 100 ml and 500 per 100 ml is considered unsafe
for drinking and bathing respectively. For
agricultural use, the count must not cross 5,000.
But the Ganga's average fecal coliform count
overshoots these limits dangerously, which means
that its water is not only unfit for drinking or
bathing but also farming.
Consider the
quality of the water at Varanasi, a temple town on
the banks of the Ganga that millions of pilgrims
and foreign tourists visit. Upstream of Varanasi's
ghats, the Ganga's fecal coliform count is 60,000
per 100 ml; downstream the figure rises to 1.5
million.
If at Varanasi, the Ganga is
sullied mainly by sewage - 32 sewers from the town
empty themselves into the river - plastic and
animal and human corpses that can be seen floating
in the river, at Kanpur it is the industrial
units, especially the tanneries, that discharge
chemicals and heavy metals like chromium into the
river.
Even in its upper reaches, the
Ganga is not free from filth. Nearly 89 million
liters of sewage is spewed daily into the river
from 12 small towns in the Himalayas. At Haridwar,
the fecal coliform count exceeds 5,500.
Drinking water with high fecal coliform
bacteria can lead to typhoid, dysentery, cholera,
viral and bacterial gastroenteritis. Contents of
industrial effluents are carcinogenic and are also
known to cause kidney and liver problems.
The Ganga is not just dirty, it has become
a deadly river.
And the Indian government
is slowly stirring out of its stupor. It announced
the Mission Clean Ganga and set up a National
Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) in February
2009 with an objective to "ensure effective
abatement of pollution and conservation of the
river Ganga by adopting a river basin approach for
comprehensive planning and management".
Given the length and catchment of this
river, its economic, social, religious and
cultural significance and the vast diversity of
the terrain - it flows from the icy Himalayan
mountains to India's vast plains - the objective
is certainly ambitious in scope.
The
project will cost around US$1.5 billion and the
World Bank will support the Indian government with
technical assistance and $1 billion loan.
Many are skeptical whether the mission
will be a success. After all, earlier attempts
have failed. In 1985, for instance, the $226
million Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched by
the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi amid much
fanfare. It was able to create waste water
treatment capacity in some areas but much of this
lies unused due to power cuts. It failed to halt
raw waste disposal into the Ganga.
Twenty-six years on, the Ganga is dirtier
than ever before.
Critics have blamed
GAP's failure to poor conception, inadequate
finances, corruption and mismanagement.
However, Mission Clean Ganga is an
improvement. It is better funded for one. Unlike
previous efforts that focused only on those towns
and industrial centers that were considered to be
highly polluting, Mission Clean Ganga is taking a
holistic view of the entire Gangetic basin.
Besides, the NGRBA is a powerful body.
Headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, its other
members include ministers from the finance,
environment, power, water resources ministries
besides the chief ministers of the five states
through which the Ganga runs. Well respected civil
society members are also in the NGRBA.
However, the approach is top-down, laments
Shripad Dharmadhikary, coordinator of the Manthan
Adhyanan Kendra, a center that researches and
monitors water and energy issues. River basin
planning "requires a bottom-up approach with
widespread and deep-rooted participation from the
people", he writes. Objectives, details of
development activities, prioritization of needs,
etc need to evolve from this process. In the Clean
Ganga Mission, however, "the whole logic is being
turned upside down, with the planning being done
from top down".
There is concern too over
the participation of the World Bank in the
project. The Bank has funded big dams and
development that has been harsh on the
environment. When it is part of the problem that
rivers like the Ganga face, why depend on it for
technical assistance on a solution?
Much
of the funding for the project will go towards
building infrastructure and institutional capacity
to reduce pollution of the Ganga. Dharmadhikary
argues that the "persistence of pollution is not
really due to lack of technology or infrastructure
or institutional capacity. While these are
important, in the Indian scenario, the critical
factors are the general ethos, the lack of
accountability in regulatory and administrative
agencies and the absence of political will in the
government and administration. Unless these are
addressed, pouring in massive amounts of money,
and privatization may actually worsen the
situation."
And importantly, the public
and the priests must be roped in to keep the Ganga
clean.
For centuries, Hindus have believed
in the purifying qualities of the Ganga. Not only
did it rid people of their sins but also the river
had the capacity to cleanse itself. Scientific
studies have indicated that such beliefs are at
least partially correct.
While all rivers
have the capacity to rejuvenate themselves, the
Ganga's waters reportedly have unique
anti-bacterial properties, a kind of
self-purifying quality that makes its waters
possess oxygen levels 25 times higher than any
other river in the world. But so terrible is the
pollution of the Ganga and the infrastructure
construction around and across it that it is now
losing its special resilience.
Rampant dam
building in the upper reaches of the river is
undermining the Ganga's capacity to rejuvenate
itself.
When forced to pass through
tunnels, where there is no oxygen and sunlight,
the river loses its capacity for
self-purification. Hydro-electric power projects
alter the riverbed's basic composition, triggering
off crucial hydrological and biological changes in
the river. The quality of water tested at the
Maneri Bhali Phase 1 project's inlet was found to
be "clean" but was "heavily polluted" at the end
of the reservoir.
If India is keen to
clean the Ganga, it will also have to ensure that
the river's inbuilt water purifier is not
destroyed. That will require putting a halt to the
ongoing excessive dam building activity, among
other things. It means changing the course of the
development path that the country has set out on.
That is something neither the government
nor the project's financial backers - the World
Bank - will be interested in.
Sudha
Ramachandran is an independent
journalist/researcher based in Bangalore. She can
be reached at sudha98@hotmail.com
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