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The Ganga River Basin Of India - The thick line is the Water Divide
"The Ganges, above all is the river of India, which has held India's heart captive and drawn uncounted millions to her banks since the dawn of history. The story of the Ganges, from her source to the sea, from old times to new, is the story of India's civilization and culture, of the rise and fall of empires, of great and proud cities, of adventures of man" - Jawhar Lal Nehru (Discovery Of India)
Along the 4 miles (6.4 kilometres) stretch of terraced bathing ghats in the holy city of Varanasi, the water of the Ganges is a "brown soup of excrement and industrial effluents." The water there contains 60,000 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 ml, 120 times the official limit of 500 faecal coliforms/100ml that is not considered safe for bathing. |
For Hindus in India, the Ganges is not just a river but a mother, a goddess, a tradition, a culture and much more. On November 4, 2008 Prime Minister Of India declared Holy Ganga as the National River Of India. But, the most sacred river in India, is so gunked up with industrial and human waste that many Hindus are now understandably hesitant about diving in it to ritually cleanse their souls as Hindu faith directs. People are complaining about skin diseases who are taking bath in it. But why the Ganges doesn't spread epidemic disease among the millions of Indians who bathe in it along it's course?
The Ganges River's long-held reputation as a purifying river appears to have a basis in science. First of all, the river carries bacteriophages that vanquish bacteria and more. As reported in a National Public Radio program, dysentery and cholera are killed off, preventing large-scale epidemics. The river has an unusual ability to retain dissolved oxygen, but the reason for this ability is unknown.
DS Bhargava, a retired professor of hydrology, who has spent a lifetime performing experiments up and down Ganges in the plains of India, says, in most rivers organic material usually exhausts a river's available oxygen and starts putrefying. But in the Ganges, an unknown substance, or "X factor" that Indians refer to as a "disinfectant," acts on organic materials and bacteria and kills them. Bhargava says that the Ganges' self-purifying quality leads to oxygen levels 25 times higher than any other river in the world.
But that was few years back, now on the other hand, an eminent river expert and head of the Ganga Research Laboratory, Institute of Technology (IT-BHU), Prof UK Chowdhary urges to save the Ganga, which he says is gradually losing its Oxygen absorption and retention capacity, adding the Ganga was the only river in the world which had 12ppm of oxygen. "The Ganga was once known as the reservoir of oxygen. But, today, it's oxygen has reduced to 4-8ppm," he said. |
Ganges purifying action has strong scientific evidence - but that power of Ganges is slowly ginving up..
Hindus have always believed that water from India's Ganges River has extraordinary powers. The Indian emperor Akbar called it the "water of immortality" and always traveled with a supply. The British East India Co. used only Ganges water on its ships during the three-month journey back to England, because it stayed "sweet and fresh."
The waters of the Ganges have always had this strange quality of not putrefying, even after long periods of storage. Scientific studies carried out by Roorkee University in the early 1980s confirmed an age-old belief that its waters were special; the Ganges was shown to have a unique quality in that it has a remarkable self-cleansing ability, certainly better than any other river in the world. It also has a very high oxygen-retaining capacity, which explains why its waters remain fresh over long periods of storage.
Conducted between 1982 and 1984, the studies indicated that concentrations of disease-causing bacteria, which shot up at waste dumping points along the river, reduced by almost 90 per cent 7 to 10km downstream from the dumps. As far back as 1896, E. Hanbury Hankin, a British physician, reported in the Annales de l'Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes died within three hours in Ganges water, while they continued to thrive after 48 hours in distilled water.
When such a unique and remarkable river becomes the source of skin problems, it is reflective of the river's degradation. Essentially a 'pipes and pumps' scheme, the GAP is being replicated in 14 polluted rivers in the country without anyone asking whether the original GAP has worked. While sewers and sewage treatment are an absolute necessity in any town or city, mindlessly repeating an expensive and arguably unsuccessful plan is probably not the best way to tackle the situation.
.Though, the Ganga has been declared the National River, millions of litres of untreated sewage is still going directly into the river everyday. Along its 2525km-long course, the Ganges receives mostly untreated sewage from 27 major towns. The Ganges Action Plan (GAP), which is touted as the centrepiece of river cleaning policy in India, has spent more than 4.5 billion rupees on the problem, but with little concrete success. The reality is that in all the main towns situated on the banks of the Ganges, untreated and partially treated sewage still flows into the river. The sewage treatment plants lie idle for most of the day because there's no power to run them, lots of the pumps are clogged up with plastic bags, and as an example of the lack of progress, in Patna the public toilets have been converted into offices, and the town sewage ponds serve as cricket grounds
Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh, while responding to a Calling Attention Motion in the Lok Sabha in August 2009, also admitted that the Ganga and Yamuna were not as clean as they were 20 years ago despite the investment of Rs 1,700 crore on them during the same period.
In 1986, according to the government's estimates, about 147 million liters per day (MLD) of sewage and industrial waste generated in Varanasi flowed into the Ganga while the installed capacity of the sewage treatment plants (STPs) constructed under GAP in the city is only 102 MLD. At the time of launching the Ganga Action Plan (GAP), the main objective was to improve the water quality of the river to acceptable standards by preventing the pollution load. The objective of GAP was, however, recast in 1987 as restoring the river water quality to the bathing class standards. It meant there should be dissolved oxygen (DO) not less than 5 mg/litre, bio-chemical oxygen demand (BOD) not more than 3 mg/litre, bacterial load/coliform count not more than 10,000 per ml, faecal coliform not more than 2,500 per 100 ml, and pH value 6.5 to 8.5.
But, according to the report of Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF), an organization working for the cause of the Ganga for over 25 years and monitoring the river quality, the BOD of Ganga water in Asi, at the beginning of the city, is around 4 mg/l and FCC/100 ml is around 60,000. The river flows downstream from this point and the quality of the water at the end of the town at the Varuna confluence is poor with BOD equal to 20 mg/l or more and FCC around 1.5 million/100 ml.
On February 20, 2009: The Central government set up the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) to address the issue ...
When such a unique and remarkable river becomes the source of skin problems, it is reflective of the river's degradation. The Expensive "Pipes and Pumps" schemes of Ganga Action Plan Seems not had any positive impact. But government is still blowing the old whistle and spending more billions of ruppes on the same old plan for 14 more rivers. It's time the government should keep bureaucrats and politicians aside and bring in some river experts to jolt down a future plan. ...