In the morning, in Varanasi, the air on the banks of the Ganges is filled with the smell of burning bodies. On the steps of the Manikarnika ghat, the most sacred shore of the city, where the Hindu dead are cremated, bonfires are already lit and mourners gather among the loads to accompany their loved ones at the end. Pyres of sandalwood (for the rich) and mango (for everyone else) are already burning; In one of them you can see a corpse wrapped in white among the flames.
On the banks of the river, which I practice from a boat, some families are busy ceremonially washing their dead, their corpses wrapped in white linen and decorated with flowers. A few meters away, a guy from another circle of relatives (honor is usually given to the eldest son) wades into the water, scattering the ashes of an already cremated relative so that the Ganges can carry his spirit to the next life. or even to moksha, the end of the cycle of rebirths and transfinishence.
The funeral ceremonies, which take place against the backdrop of the ancient city, are undeniably beautiful; But the same can’t be said for the river itself. The surface of the water is covered with ash; Ceremonial flowers remain in the swirls. Downstream, some men dive in search of abandoned jewelry. Barely 50 meters upstream, the group, once their rites are finished, bathe in the dirty water. An older man, dressed in white, ends his bath with a classic blessing: he takes the fetid water of the Ganges in one hand and takes a sip.
The Ganges is one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, providing water to around six hundred million people. But for Hindus, it is more than a waterway: it is Ma Ganga, the mother river, formed – according to the sacred text of the Bhagavata Purana – when Lord Vishnu himself opened a hole in the universe and that divine water flooded the world. The water of the Ganges is widely used in Hindu prayers and ceremonies; You can buy plastic bottles from stalls across the subcontinent or order one from Amazon in the UK for just £3.
And yet, despite its sacred status, the Ganges is one of the most infected primary rivers on the planet. The U. N. called it “terribly contaminated. ” As India’s population soared (in April 2023, it overtook China as the world’s most populous country), hundreds of millions of people settled along the Ganges floodplain. : poisonous pesticides, commercial waste, plastic, and at most billions of liters of human effluent.
It’s March 2022 and I’ve come to India to report on my book, Wasteland, about the global waste industry. And few waste-related challenges are more critical (but less appealing) than sanitation. In the Global North, Wastewater Is a Challenge That idea that many of us believed had been more or less solved in the Victorian era. But access to safe drinking water and sufficient sanitation remains a pressing global challenge. Some 1. 7 billion people worldwide still lack access to modern sanitation facilities.
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It is estimated that every day, an additional 494 million people without access to flush sinks or closed sewers are forced to defecate in the open, in sewers or in plastic bags. The World Health Organization estimates that one in ten people consume wastewater annually, either through clean drinking water or through infected food. In India, an estimated 37 million people are affected by waterborne diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and hepatitis. Worldwide, poor sanitation kills more children each year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.
Sanitation is one of the gadgets that most of us in the Global North don’t think about until something works. In the UK, sewers have recently made headlines for the following reasons: Many of Britain’s rivers and beaches are polluted by sewage overflows. and agricultural runoff. According to the UK Environment Agency, water companies discharged their wastewater into English rivers 301,091 times in 2022, for a total of more than 1. 7 million hours; On British beaches, sewage is said to make swimmers sick. The health problems in Britain have been caused by years of neglect: systemic underinvestment by for-profit owners; austere, stingy and inefficient regulation; and the increasing expansion of our concrete urban spaces, which divert water from natural resources such as soil and wetlands into our waterways.
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In India, as in much of the Global South, the challenge is the opposite: in most cases, the sewers were never there. In this sense, the removal of pollutants from the Ganges is a rare sign of success. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, one of his first moves was to launch the Clean India campaign, a nationwide effort to install modern sanitation and waste treatment services in a country that in the past lacked they.
Even critics of Modi’s government – denounced, among other things, for its Islamophobic policies and oppression of the press – have to admit that the numbers have been staggering since then. Between 2014 and 2019, according to an official estimate, India installed 110 million toilets. , providing health services to around one billion people. Just over a decade ago, India was known to have the highest rate of open defecation (i. e. , open excrement) in the world. Thanks to this vast expansion of public and personal restrooms, this rate would have fallen. The challenge is that with so many new toilets, the wastewater has to go somewhere.
In this sense, India resembles many countries in the Global South that are urbanizing. But India is also exclusionary in the sense that Hindu culture places rivers at the center of devotional beliefs. And it is because of this explanation that the Modi government, along with its Clean India campaign initiative, has put forward an expensive infrastructure plan to plug the national river: the Namami Ganges (“Obedience to the Ganges”) program. This is far from the first attempt. Previous governments have been launching “action plans” to plug the Ganges since at least the 1980s. But beyond the efforts, beset by accusations of corruption and mismanagement, they have rarely succeeded.
“The sewers were running everywhere. They were running into the streets.
To date, the Namami Gange program has cost more than 328 billion rupees ($3. 77 billion) and promises to build more than 170 new sewage treatment plants and 5,211 kilometers of sewage pipes, enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean. This is a desirable brake on the global effort to plug our rivers and seas. After all, if you can’t plug a river sacred to millions of people, what hope do we have for the rest of us?
The offices of Jal Kal, Varanasi’s water agency, are on a congested highway west of the cremation ghats and the Old City, in one of Varanasi’s busiest advertising districts. When I arrive, there is structure and activity everywhere. In his air-conditioned office, Raghuvendra Kumar, CEO of Jal Kal, explains that this is one of the most difficult situations the Namami Gange mission has ever faced. “This city doesn’t sleep,” he says.
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Kumar, a well-groomed, side-parted boy, dressed in a black leather jacket and surgical mask (at the moment, India is not far from having come out of a Covid spike), has been in Jal Kal since 2018. “When I arrived, the situation in the city was much worse, because the paintings were still going on,” Kumar says. “The sewers were running everywhere. They were running into the streets.
Varanasi is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. It is situated at the confluence of two rivers: the Varuna and the Assi, both rivers of the Ganges, which here join the course of the river. The religious and tourist destination The city center, on the western bank of the river, is a maze of alleyways, many of which are too narrow to drive through and blocked by stray cows and market stalls. The city’s original main sewer (the main sewer, to which the pipes end) was built by the British in the early 20th century, but the local government explains that the precursor can be traced back to the Mughal Empire.
Until a few years ago, much of the city’s sewage was discharged untreated into the Ganges through public sewers, or nullahs, which flowed into the same bank as the ghats, where other people regularly bathe. Since 2016, downtown has noticed installing several miles of new sewer lines, connecting pipes that previously flowed directly into the river to a new sewer manifold, which now discharges much of the flow to one of three new wastewater treatment systems. Of the 23 known pipes in the afterlife that carried raw sewage into the Ganges, Kumar says 20 are clogged and the rest are operational. Later, on the same boat that took me past the cremation sites, I see it for myself: the city’s maximum. The well-known drainage canal, Sisamau, is now blocked. All that’s left is a stable steak.
In a city that has seen near-constant civil engineering work over the past two decades, sewer work has not been popular. (“Changing the mindset of the population is a very complicated task,” Kumar says. )of the new waste control regime, Jal Kal and the State Pollution Control Board have published a number of local announcements; The city broadcast public announcements over the loudspeakers of garbage collection vehicles, warned against open defecation, and asked citizens not to pollute the river and new drains with garbage. ” In the last 3 to five years, citizens have become accustomed to improving their way of life and changing their behavior,” says Kumar. “And now it’s become a habit among people. “
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This is not the only replacement that has happened in Varanasi. Flowers from temples that once clogged the banks of the Ganges after cremations and devotional festivals are now picked from the banks in marked tanks and from the river with floating barriers; leftovers are composted or collected through a local company, Phool, which turns them into incense sticks. The city’s broader green policies have reduced pollutant levels: Varanasi passed legislation banning certain plastics in the holy city and introduced a program requiring more than 580 diesel boats on the river to be switched to run on compressed natural gas, reducing oil spills on the water’s surface. The city has also set out to “beautify” the ghats, employing groups of staff to collect the remaining waste for recycling and artists to paint artwork celebrating the Namami Ganges campaign. Most importantly, 361 public toilets have been built, connected to the new sewers, to decrease the rate of open defecation.
Among the Namami Ganges projects inaugurated by Modi himself is a new wastewater treatment plant in Dinapur, northeast of the city, designed to treat up to 140 million liters of effluent per day. Similarly, as the city has grown, so has the sanitation system. . The day after my stopover in Jal Kal, I stop at a new sewage treatment plant in Ramnagar, on the west bank of the river, where the population is booming. On my way to the factory, I’m surrounded by construction sites. , whether formal or informal; At one point, we come across an organization digging up bricks on a newly laid out road, possibly for a housing structure.
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I meet Shashikari Shastri, an engineer-in-charge, who shows me around. The sewage treatment plant is an elegant and charming place (at least, as good as sewage treatment plants are), with pale green buildings and pretty rows of trees in the flower beds.
Most wastewater treatment plants work the same way. Bottom line: Larger solids (i. e. feces) are filtered out in large, open tanks, and any solids left behind can settle to the back of the tank or float to the surface and be removed. The remaining water is then channeled into a series of tanks and combined with bacteria, which digest the leftover biological matter and kill any remaining pathogens. The ponds are aerated to promote digestion. (The result tends to be bubbling sewer channels (which, if you close your eyes, can look like fountains of water, with no smell. ) At this point, all the lingering solids are deposited again. There are different technologies for the third and even fourth stage to further whiten the water: ultraviolet light, chlorination, etc.
The old wastewater treatment plants in Varanasi operate using an activated sludge system, in which part of the solids removed from the sedimentation process are re-injected as a kind of bacterial starter. Ramnagar, however, uses a modern A20 (anaerobic-anoxic) design, in which effluent passes through additional tanks to reduce dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus. “Our purpose is to minimize eutrophication, because last year a lot of algae and eutrophication were discovered [in the Ganges],” Shastri says. Eutrophication occurs when a water structure becomes excessively enriched with nutrients and minerals, resulting in an explosion of algae that can choke the river of aquatic life.
“People come from far-flung places and worship Ganges as their mother. »
Finally we came to the outlet pipe, a series of tiled waterfalls across the river. Right now, Shastri says, the treated water is much cleaner than when it arrived. This is measured using biological oxygen demand (BOD). The amount of dissolved oxygen in the water that bacteria need to remove any unwanted biological matter, an oblique measure of the amount of waste found in the water. “The BOD at the inlet is 180 mg/liter,” Shastri says. On the market, it’s five to 10 mg/liter. ” In the sand, children play. Another organization mines sand (illegally, probably) to make building materials.
The sewage treatment plant, like several sewage treatment plants I visited along the Ganges in my book, is an impressive, if small, place. (Despite my request, I didn’t have access to the largest factory in the city, Dinapur, during the time I was there. Still, I couldn’t help but think that its small length was woefully insufficient for the task at hand.
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SIZE IS NOT the only problem. The rosy picture of the Namami Ganga crusade, crafted through city officials, does not correspond to the truth on the ground. Although almost everyone I spoke to in Varanasi was positive about the effect of the crusade on the river and the city, it is clear that, despite the immediate speed of construction, the Ganges is still far from clean.
One afternoon in Varanasi, my journalist colleague Rahul Singh and I walked to the banks of the Assi River (or “Assi nullah [sewer],” as many other people still call it colloquially). Despite the efforts of the Namami Ganges project, the banks of the Assi River were buried ankle-deep under plastic waste: microbags, bottles, packets, jars. I met one of the recyclers in the city who collected PET bottles, which he can sell for 10 rupees (less than 10 pence). a kilo. A little further upstream, floating barriers have been installed in the water to facilitate the recovery of waste; So much trash has accumulated on them that they have created reef-like islands in the middle of the creek.
When the Assi reaches the Ganges, it passes through a pumping station designed to remove counterfeit waste before transferring the wastewater downstream to a treatment plant. But when I visited, the pumping station was slightly busy and operating at a fraction of its capacity. of the rope fences used to contain the waste was broken; Inside the facility, plastic and other waste were slowly removed from a conveyor belt and transported in bags to be recycled or incinerated. A staff member (who agreed to remain anonymous) told me that the factory extracts a ton of plastic waste a day.
The grim truth of some of the infrastructure runs counter to the government’s line on the Namami Ganges campaign, which tends to be presented in dazzling, nationalistic tones. The truth is that only about 10 years after Modi unveiled the project, the Ganges in Varanasi, and much of its expanse, remains contaminated.
According to figures from the government’s own Pollution Control Bureau, in 2020, river water samples collected in Varanasi far exceeded India’s recommended limits for fecal coliform bacteria and fecal streptococci; the latter exceeded the limit by more than 20 times. The same thing happened on my stopover in the market city of Kanpur, known for its chromium and steel contamination. It’s not just the Ganges: the Yamuna in Delhi has recorded fecal streptococcal levels 10,800 times higher than the recommended limit. Across India, there are reports of rivers filled with poisonous foam. Waste or lakes that catch fire.
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This is the truth of a country like India, which is experiencing such staggering growth: the risk for Indian civic planners is that when new infrastructure is built (sewage treatment plants, waste treatment facilities, roads), the population is already larger than (This is not a uniquely Indian problem either. Every major trading country — from China over the past two decades to the United States and other Western countries several decades ago — has faced river pollutant crises. )Closing the Ganges is a point of contention for devout activists, for whom the factor of plugging the Ganges is more than practical or political. It’s moral.
ONE AFTERNOON IN Varanasi, I return to the ghats to meet one of the top critics of the Namami Gange project. Vishwambhar Nath Mishra is an intense guy in his fifties, with white hair and a thick mustache. Mishra is a professor of electronic engineering at Banaras Hindu University and also the mahant (high priest) of the Sankat Mochan Hanuguy temple in Varanasi, a position he inherited from his late father, Veer Bhadra Mishra. Mishra’s father was a lifelong Ganga activist and in the 1980s he founded the Sankat Mochan Foundation, an NGO whose aim is to protect the river; When we meet, in a room near the base, there is a photo of Major Mishra on the wall, smiling happily. When Mishra Sr. died in 2013, Vishwambhar inherited the foundation and religious duties from him.
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For Mishra, this mix of engineering, campaigning and faith gives him a unique attitude to the demands of cleaning the Ganges. “The use of this river is completely different from other river systems,” says Mishra. “People come from far away places and love the Ganges like their mother. Some of those other people come gently to touch the water of the Ganges and put it on their foreheads. Some other people come to swim religiously in the river. And some They take sips of Ganges water. This sip is a sacred ritual that is part of the river bathing that many devout Indians take.
“Now, if other people drink water, that means the quality will have to be safe drinking water; we don’t deserve any compromise,” Mishra says. For him, it’s personal. As a devout leader, Mishra himself must drink water from the Ganges in his daily bath.
Mishra’s weapon in the fight for the Ganges is simple: data. In 1993, the Sankat Mochan Foundation established one of the few independent laboratories to test the water quality of the Ganges in Varanasi. “That’s why [the government] is afraid. ” Mishra says, “We have a database that shows the truth about the health of the river. Since then, the base has been tracking the water (bacteria levels, oxygen demand) and has noticed that the health of the river worsens with India’s growth.
According to Mishra and his fellow activists, the government’s figures on sewage in Varanasi do not match. The largest wastewater treatment plant, in Dinapur, has a treatment capacity of 140 million liters per day (MLD). We know that at [the Dinapur plant] they can only bring 60 MLD of sewage,” says Mishra, growing more and more animated as he speaks. “In Goitha, where the capacity is 120 MLD, a few months ago, when I interviewed those people, they are only capable of transporting 10 to 20 MLD of wastewater. That’s all. So, as a scientist, you can just calculate efficiency. Similarly, Mishra says the government’s claims that sewage no longer flows into the river are false. “Five years ago, we discovered 33 sites that were discharging sewage. . . That number has dropped to 15 or 16,” he says. (The Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board did not respond to requests for comment. )
“We have to save ourselves somehow. “
While Indian devotees and environmental activists like Mishra hope that the Ganges will once again be drinkable, the Indian government has so far only stated its goal of making the Ganges in Varanasi an elegant B river, reserved only for swimming. Even through that standard, Mishra says, the task fails. “We have clinical parameters that indicate that if the Ganges is a class B river, the total number of fecal coliforms should be less than 500 per 100 ml,” Mishra says. (Fecal coliforms are a strong indicator of the presence of other pathogens. )Mishra shows me a ream of papers in which he has published graphs of laboratory water quality knowledge in many places, going back centuries. month. ” At the time of supply [as of March 2022], where we are sitting in Tulshi ghat, the figure is 41,400 per cent ml. At the end of [Varanasi], where a large canal is pouring out, it’s 51 million.
(Although I haven’t been able to independently verify those figures, even data from the Indian government shows that pathogen levels in the Ganges in Varanasi are several times higher than protection targets. )
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In 2014, before the launch of the Namami Ganges program, Mishra sat down with Modi to talk about his hopes of clearing the Ganges. Since then, Mishra’s base has come up with its own proposals for remedial projects, but they have been ignored. The Control Board and the state government question the knowledge of the base; Mishra, meanwhile, says the government’s figures, which are averages of samples taken across the full width of the river, do not reflect the truth experienced by bathers in the ghats, where sewage flows into the Ganges and the water is slower. They never recognize our lab because they know it will be a big challenge for them. But we have all the knowledge since 1993. “
Mishra also argues that advertising interests prevent the government from taking even more decisive action to reduce pollution. “The Ganges is a very fertile cow. So everyone is dealing in the name of the Ganges,” he says. (Allegations of corruption have plagued many of India’s Ganges cleansing campaigns, even though Mishra has not shared any explicit evidence of corruption. India’s Jal Shakti Ministry, or Water Ministry, did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. )
When asked, most Indian politicians and engineers will say that an absolutely natural Ganges, such as the one Mishra seeks, is at best impossible. (“The other religious don’t follow logic,” SK Barman, task manager of the national water company’s Ganges Pollution Prevention Unit, told me. “We have to do it to attain salvation one way or another. Moksha, moksha, moksha. “) But in achieving the In this conversation, it is also transparent that without Mishra and the countless environmental activists across India campaigning for the recovery of the Ganges, the challenge would be worse.
ONE YEAR SINCE my last stop in Varanasi, it is evident that clean-up efforts in India are still far from what the government’s rhetoric would have the public believe. According to a public data request through Indian news firm Down to Earth, in 2023, 71% of monitoring stations on the Ganges River reported “alarming” degrees of fecal coliform bacteria. More than 66% of the pipelines in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Varanasi is located, still flow into the Ganges and its tributaries.
There is no doubt that the work of the Namami Ganges has progressed, and not only in terms of the number of washbasins installed and sewage treatment plants put into operation. Almost every single member of the public I spoke to in India – in Varanasi, Kanpur and New Delhi – demonstrated that, anecdotally, pollutant-related disorders are improving. Not long ago, corpses were discovered in the river, and during the rainy season, sewage flowed into the ghats. Today, sightings of aquatic life, such as the Ganges River dolphin, can be observed. , are becoming more and more numerous.
And in the 2022 national elections, Modi’s BJP party remained in place, a significant sign ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In March 2023, the Modi government introduced the Namami Gange II Mission, an additional $2. 56 billion expenditure to expand the program and continue with completion. infrastructure already in place.
As for Mishra and other activists fighting for an empty holy river, his crusade continues, even if it makes him unpopular with the government and the pro-Modi press. “I heard, ‘Why? Why don’t you say that the Ganges is empty?”He said Mishra. No I can say that. We are completely committed to the Ganges and deceive people. For me, the Ganges is the medium of my life.
It’s a holy mission, I say.
“It’s a sacred project and it’s a clinical project. “
This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
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