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The Ganges, or as it known in India, the Ganga, is a river of stories. Scholars have collected many tales about this river that springs from a dozen sources on the roof of the world. Each of the stories shares the theme that Ganga, daughter of the Himalaya, is persuaded to shed her purifying waters on the sinful Earth and thus bring salvation to humanity.
The Ganga is the great collector of Himalayan snows. The many sources of the Ganga flow south and east from melting glaciers in these highlands, collecting into the great trunk stream that flows due east before bending slightly southward into the Bay of Bengal. Little water comes from the dry lowlands across the western and southern portions of the Ganga drainage basin.
As the rivers of the Ganga basin leave the steep topography of the Himalaya and enter the hill country to the south, they flow through the first of many cities spread along their courses. Cities such as Kathmandu, Nepal, along the tributary Bishnumati River, release a variety of contaminants into the rivers, and water quality deteriorates rapidly downstream. Organic pollution comes from the tens of thousands of bodies cremated on the Ganga itself, as well as human and animal wastes. More dangerous and persistent chemical contaminants released by the hundreds of factories along the Ganga and its tributaries include mercury, highly toxic heavy metals such as lead and copper, and various synthetic chemicals. Crop lands leak pesticides and excess fertilizers into the rivers1.
A 2001 study of contaminants in tissue from humans, domestic animals, and wildlife throughout India found that compounds such as PCBs are ubiquitous2. These compounds persist in the environment and accumulate in the tissues of living creatures, reaching higher concentrations than those ingested by the organism. Many of the compounds disrupt reproduction and development, as well as being carcinogens.
Foreign visitors to India have long commented on the filth of the Ganga. Indians historically believed that the river was physically as well as spiritually pure and thus had no trouble bathing in and drinking water in which partially cremated corpses floated downstream. Nonetheless, 80 percent of the health problems in contemporary India come from waterborne diseases. No one in India spoke of the Ganga as polluted until the late 1970s, by which time large stretches of the river – over 600 kilometers – were effectively ecologically dead. National attitudes have now changed dramatically, and grassroots environmental concern about water pollution, as well as government attempts to control pollution, are growing.
The government launched the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) in 1985. GAP includes interception and diversion of sewage, construction of sewage treatment plants, and development of water quality standards and protective legislation. Some aspects of water quality – dissolved oxygen levels, phosphate and nitrate concentrations – have improved locally as a result of GAP, but other contaminants such as pesticides in agricultural runoff remain largely unchanged because they are not treated in wastewater plants. A 1994 study found that residues of the insecticide aldrin, for example, commonly exceeded the World Health Organization’s guidelines for drinking water3. As in much of the world, water quality standards in India are only as good as their enforcement, which has been uneven. Clean water is now a limiting resource across the Ganga drainage, despite the relatively wet climate of much of the region.
River pollution is in many ways difficult for people to grapple with. An activist cannot literally embrace a portion of a river the way that people protesting excessive tree cutting in India can hug a tree. Because a river integrates an entire drainage basin, the contaminants present at any point along the river represent everything entering the main channel upstream, as well as tributaries, surface runoff, and subsurface flow. Unless the contaminants produce a highly visible result such as a massive fish kill below an industrial point source, the effects of water pollution are usually subtle and slow-acting.
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