POLLUTION IN THE GANGES AND OBSTACLES AND EFFORTS TO CLEAN IT UP

POLLUTION IN THE GANGES

People bathing and washing clothes along the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi

The Ganges river basin is one of the most populous river basins on Earth, home to more than 400 million people. Some 345 million gallons of raw sewage, tons of plastic waster and 70 million gallons of industrial waste flows into the Ganges everyday. Dead goats, monkeys and occasion dead beggars can be seen floating in it. The amounts of fecal bacteria sometimes reach lethal levels. Diseases that have been caught bathing in the river include hepatitis amoebic dysentery, jaundice and cholera. It has been said that there are so many toxins in the Ganges that even bacteria won’t grow in it. Even so, Indians drink water from the river, bathe in it and irrigate their crops with it.

According to the National Ganga River Basin Authority, which is trying to clean up the river, the amount of toxins, chemicals and dangerous bacteria found in it is now almost 3000 times higher than is considered safe by the World Health Organisation. “As a 10-year-old I remember swimming in the river; the water was clear and green - you could see all the way through to the bottom,” Abdul Kalam, 78, who has lived in Varanasi all his life, told the Times in 2014. “I remember seeing sawfish, turtles and gharials swimming out in the monsoons. Now the water is dirty, black, and hidden by all the rubbish. It has changed so much I cannot believe it.” [Source: Robin Pagnamenta, The Times, June 2, 2014]

Much of the pollution in the Ganges is from untreated sewage. The centuries-old sewer in Varanasi is overtaxed and the water treatment facility doesn't work, partly because the local power stations can't supply it with enough electricity. Raw sewage plummets into the river from half a dozen places at a rate of 3,500 gallons a minute. On the northern edge of the city, near where the Aryans built their first camp, the water is so foul that bubbles from chemical reactions form. The smell of the toxic brew is so horrible that even seasoned boatmen hold their nose as they paddle. Plastic waste and other trash accumulate in and along the Ganges and its tributaries all year. But most of the waste is flushed into the river and out to the Bay of Bengal during the monsoon rains, which last from June to September. [Source: Geoffrey Ward, Smithsonian magazine, September 1985]

Why People Bath in the Polluted Ganges

water buffaloes taking bath in the Ganges with litter and waste collected on the bank

Despite all people regularly bath in the Ganges. Hindus refuse to believe that the river is polluted and scoff at accusations that this is the case. Environmentalists try to get Hindus to take an interest in the fate of the river by asking them first if the believe the Ganges is their mother. When they say yes the environmentalist ask: "Would you show such disrespect to your mother? Pour filth over her?" When they say No, they gain more converts. In Varanasi people who bathe in the Ganges say it is a question mind over matter. Hindus believe the Ganges can not be contaminated. Hindus don't like the term "polluted" attached to the Ganges. Environmentalists now favor milder language to infer that the sacred river is "suffering." "I will not stop my taking my daily bath in the Ganges," one man told journalist Geoffrey Ward of Smithsonian magazine, "but the struggle inside me every morning is terrible, inexpressible." [Source: Santha Rama Rau, National Geographic February 1986]

Laura Parker wrote in National Geographic: Sudipta Sen, who grew up in Kolkata and teaches South Asian history at the University of California, Davis, spent 14 years writing his book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River. He found the paradox of the modern river, so worshipped and yet so neglected, frustrating to write about. “The river is really two rivers,” Sen said. “There is this belief that the river can clean itself and has magical properties. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? I have seen this. I have heard many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.” The Ganges reinforces that story line during the summer monsoon, when it is said to be “in swell.” At Patna, where the river is joined by several large tributaries, widening considerably, the monsoon converts it into a raging torrent that regularly floods Bihar, the mostly rural state of which Patna is the capital. [Source: Laura Parker, National Geographic, April 2022]

Ganges Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Beings

In March 2017, The Ganges and its main tributary, the Yamuna, were granted the legal status of living entities by an Uttarakhand court . The ruling gave the rivers rights, duties and liabilities similar to those of people, making pollution or damage potentially equivalent to harming a person. The court appointed officials as legal custodians and ordered the creation of a management board to protect the rivers. [Source: Michael Safi, The Guardian and agencies, March 21, 2017]

The decision came amid decades of unsuccessful efforts to clean the heavily polluted Ganges. Large amounts of untreated sewage and industrial waste entered the river each day, while the Yamuna was severely contaminated by sewage and industrial effluents. Environmental activists argued that better governance and enforcement were needed in addition to treatment plants and infrastructure.

The Indian ruling followed New Zealand's recognition of the Whanganui River as a living entity with legal rights, reflecting the Māori view of the river as an ancestor and an indivisible living whole. Both decisions represented efforts to give rivers legal protection rather than treating them solely as resources to be owned and managed.

Cleaning Up the Ganges

Efforts to clean up the Ganges have included introducing electric crematories, more efficient than wooden pyres; and releasing turtles that eat decaying matter into the river. Most of the turtles were killed by poachers for their meat. Sadhus have demonstrated in Allahabad demanding that the Ganges be cleaned up.

"In my grandfather time," a Varanasi environmental activist told Ward, "not even soap was allowed near the river; no one was permitted to wear shoes. The maharajahs paid for keeping up the ghats, and the “pandas” and boatmen policed the waterfront. Anyone who dared dirty the riverbank would have been lynched. Now everyone is exercising his democratic right to ruin the city...Benares was once a quiet center of religion and contemplation. It has become a city of shopkeepers and ruffians." [Source: Geoffrey Ward, Smithsonian magazine, September 1985]

In an attempt to save the sacred river a citizen movement called Swatcha Ganges (Cleanse the Ganges) was hatched. The slogan for the group is: "The Ganges is our Mother...If the Ganges is your Mother how can you allow this harsh treatment to be meted out to her?" To remove the garbage boys use mesh-boxes to scrape up green scum and dancers and singers are sent into bazaars to raise awareness. The World Bank has provided the Varanasi government with millions of dollars to build seven modern sewage treatment plants and electric crematoriums. [Source: Geoffrey Ward, Smithsonian magazine, September 1985]

History of Trying to Clean Up the Ganges

George Black wrote in the The New Yorker:“The first concerted attempt to clean the Ganges began in 1986, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched the initial phase of what he called the Ganga Action Plan. He made the announcement on the ghats of Varanasi and focussed on the city’s sewers and the tanneries of Kanpur. The effort was haphazard. Thirty-five sewage-treatment plants were built in the three most populous states along the river—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal—but their capacity was based on the population at the time, and they quickly became obsolete. Moreover, although the central government paid for the plants, municipalities were left to operate them, and often failed to pay the wages or the electricity bills to keep them running.

“In 1993, under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, new treatment plants and other pollution-abatement projects were added on several of the river’s larger tributaries. This phase was followed by the creation, in 2009, of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, by the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. For the next two years, the cleanup was directed by Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister. Ramesh, who is now an opposition member of Parliament, is in his early sixties, with a head of thick gray hair. In many respects, he epitomizes the old Congress Party élite that Modi detests: cosmopolitan, fluent in English, Western-educated, with graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon and M.I.T. Ramesh told me that he had taken a more comprehensive view of the problem than his predecessors. The unfinished hydropower projects I’d seen in the Himalayas were the result of a Supreme Court decision, which he had strongly supported, to halt construction in the ecologically sensitive headwaters of the river.

In June 2011, Indian officials signed an agreement with the World Bank to use a $1 billion loan to finance the first major new effort in more than 20 years to cleanse the Ganges. According to the New York Times: The long-awaited loan is part of a government project that aims to halt the discharge of untreated wastewater into the river by 2020. The project, founded in 2009, replaced the 1986 Ganga Action Plan, the last large-scale attempt to address the pollution. That initiative was able to introduce waste water treatment in certain areas, it failed to halt raw waste disposal into the Ganges. Critics said it was inadequately financed and poorly managed. “What we’re trying to do is take a step back and not look at just one sector — waste water — but take a larger sectoral approach,” said Genevieve Connors, a water resources specialist for the World Bank who is involved in the project. But she noted that the task of cleaning a river was enormous, saying it “takes decades and costs hundreds of billions of dollars.” [Source: Nida Najar, New York Times, June 14, 2011]

Ganges Sewage Treatment Plants in Varanasi

George Black wrote in the The New Yorker: Like the Ganges, Varanasi is said to be immune to degradation, although this is hard to reconcile with the physical reality of the place. Cylindrical towers, one emblazoned with an image of Shiva, stood at intervals along the riverfront—sewage-pumping stations that are designed to protect the most sensitive expanse of the bathing ghats, from Assi Ghat, in the south, to Raj Ghat, in the north. R. K. Dwivedi, a stout, sixty-four-year-old man who was in charge of the treatment plants, told me that the pumping stations, which were built in the nineteen-seventies, had recently been upgraded. But less than a third of the sewage that is generated by the 1.5 million people of Varanasi is treated; the rest goes directly into the river. [Source: George Black, The New Yorker, July 25, 2016]

“From Assi Ghat to Raj Ghat, you will find almost nil flow coming to Ganga,” Dwivedi said. I pointed out that the Assi River, a thirty-foot-wide drainage channel that flows into the Ganges just upstream of Assi Ghat, bypasses the pumping stations and pours raw sewage into the river. Dwivedi said that there was a comprehensive plan to install a sewerage system in the newer, northern half of Varanasi. But the engineers were still struggling with the challenge of laying sewer lines under the tortuous lanes of the old city—a problem that defied the efforts of Dwivedi’s predecessors all the way back to the days of the Raj.

The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (2004-2014) ordered that next generation of sewage-treatment plants be based on population estimates for 2025. The central government, in addition to funding plant construction, bore seventy per cent of the operating and management costs for five years. Several new treatment plants became operative in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Heavily-Polluting Tanneries on the Ganges in Kanpur

Kanpur sits on the Ganges and, with a population of more than three million, is the largest city in Uttar Pradesh. It is a very polluted place. George Black wrote in The New Yorker “Kanpur has four hundred and two registered tanneries, which discharge more than two-thirds of their waste into the river. Most are immediately downstream from the Massacre Ghat, in a Muslim neighborhood called Jajmau. In deference to Hindu sensitivities, the slaughter of cows is illegal in Uttar Pradesh. Most of the hides that reach Kanpur’s tanneries are from water buffalo; the small number of cowhides are either imported or the result of natural death or roadkill. [Source: George Black, The New Yorker, July 25, 2016]

I spent a day in the tannery district with Rakesh Jaiswal, the head of EcoFriends. Jaiswal founded the organization in 1993. We stopped at a cleared plot of land about a quarter of a mile from the river, where the detritus of the leather industry was heaped in large piles. Some were offcuts of wet blue. Others were made up of scraps of hide with hair and bits of flesh still attached, surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies. A laborer was hacking at the muck with a three-tined pitchfork. When he was done, it would be sold to make chicken feed and glue. Nearby, an open drain carried a stream of tannery waste down a gentle slope to the Ganges. The odor suggested a mixture of decomposing animal matter, battery acid, and burned hair.

“Tannery owners in both the poorest and the most lucrative parts of the industry complained bitterly to me that they had been singled out for persecution because they were Muslim. “From the government side, there is nothing but trouble,” Hafizurrahman, the owner of the small Hafizurrahman Tannery, in Jajmau, told me. Hafizurrahman, who goes by only one name, has been the president of the Small Tanners Association since 1987; his tannery works with offcuts that are rejected by larger enterprises. When I met him, the yard of the tannery was strewn with pieces of dried rawhide that would be turned into chew toys for dogs. A skinny teen-age boy, bare to the waist and glistening with sweat, squelched around in a brick-lined pit, sorting pieces of “wet blue,” tinged that color from processing with highly toxic chromium salts, which leaves the leather more supple than the older, vegetable-processing method.

“Later, I drove with Jaiswal to the outskirts of Kanpur, to see the irrigation canal. It ran along an elevated berm where workers had spread out hides to dry in the sun. The treated mixture of sewage and tannery waste came gushing out of two rusted outflow pipes and made its way down the canal at a fair clip. In 1999, Jaiswal conducted a study of contamination in the villages that were using this water for irrigation; his samples revealed dangerous levels of chromium in agricultural produce and in milk. I asked Jaiswal if the situation had improved since then. “The quality of the water is the same,” he said.

Corruption and Obstacles to Cleaning Up the Tanneries of Kanpur

George Black wrote in The New Yorker ““Cleaning up the tanneries of Kanpur has proved just as intractable a problem as cleaning up the sewers of Varanasi.In 1998, Jaiswal brought a lawsuit against the central government and a number of polluting industries, and a hundred and twenty-seven tanneries were closed. Many were allowed to reopen after installing a primary-treatment plant, but Jaiswal told me that the levels of chromium pollution in tannery wastewater were still as much as eighty times above the legal limit, suggesting that the plant owners were not spending the money to operate them, and that the new regulations were only spottily enforced. From the tanneries, the wastewater is pumped to a central treatment facility, which was built in 1994. At the plant, sewage and tannery waste are combined in a ratio of three to one. After treatment, the mixture is used for irrigation. The plant handles nine million litres of tannery waste a day, barely a third of what the industry generates. When I asked the project engineer why the plant had never been upgraded, he shrugged. [Source: George Black, The New Yorker, July 25, 2016]

“Hafizurrahman conceded that the tanneries do foul the Ganges, but said that the real culprits are corrupt state and city authorities. In 1994, when the city government opened a central plant to treat the tannery waste, tannery owners had to contribute part of the cost. Then the construction budget tripled and, with it, their contribution. “There were only a hundred and seventy-five tanneries at that time,” he said. “But then another two hundred and twenty-seven came up—and the government asked them to pay again. But it never upgraded the plant. They just took the money.”

“In 2014, the Council on Foreign Relations named India’s judiciary, police, and political parties the three most corrupt institutions in the country. Local officials commonly skim off a substantial percentage of the fee paid to private contractors working on public-service projects, such as water supply, electricity, and sewage treatment. “It’s almost legal,” Rakesh Jaiswal, the head of EcoFriends, a small environmental group in Kanpur, said. “If it’s thirty or forty per cent, it’s not corruption—it’s more like a right. Sometimes all the money is pocketed by the authorities, a hundred per cent, and the work takes place only on paper.” I asked if things had improved under Modi, and he shook his head. “Not even one per cent has changed,” he said.

“Taj Alam, the president of the Uttar Pradesh Leather Industry Association, had another complaint. Alam’s tannery, Kings International, makes high-end saddlery for export; situated in Unnao, a small town a dozen miles from Kanpur, it is surrounded by manicured gardens and walls draped with bougainvillea. In his ornate, air-conditioned office, Alam noted that the government shuts down the tanneries each year, sometimes for several weeks, to avoid polluting the river during India’s greatest religious celebration, the Hindu bathing festival at Allahabad, a hundred and thirty miles downstream. This costs the industry tens of millions of dollars, Alam said. “But you have ten million people shitting in the river, urinating there, throwing stuff on the ghats. The tanning sector is maybe 99.99 per cent Muslim. Tell me, has the government imposed any treatment-plant order on any other industry?”

Modi’s Effort to Clean Up the Ganges

George Black wrote in The New Yorker: “Indian governments have been trying to clean up the Ganges for thirty years. Official estimates of the amount spent on this effort vary widely, from six hundred million dollars to as much as three billion dollars; every attempt has been undone by corruption and apathy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in May of 2014, is the latest to try. Two months after Modi was elected, he announced his most ambitious cleanup initiative: Namami Gange, or Obeisance to the Ganges. As evidence of his capability, Modi points to the western state of Gujarat, where he served as Chief Minister from 2001 to 2014, presiding over impressive economic growth. The Sabarmati River, which flows through Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat, was given an elegant tree-shaded esplanade, where residents now walk their dogs and take the evening air; still, it remains one of the most polluted rivers in India. [Source: George Black, The New Yorker, July 25, 2016]

“For the most part, Modi did not need to appeal to Hindu-nationalist passions. But his promise to clean up the Ganges plays directly into India’s charged religious and caste politics. Two problems are paramount. One is pollution from the tannery industry, which is centered in Kanpur, roughly midway along the river, and is almost entirely Muslim-owned. The other is sewage from Varanasi, two hundred miles downstream—an ancient city, considered the spiritual center of Hinduism, where the river is effectively an open sewer. Both cities are in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of two hundred and fifteen million and is central to Indian electoral politics. It is also notorious for extreme poverty, rampant corruption, rigid caste divisions, and communal violence, in which most of the victims are Muslims. At least half the mass killings recorded in India in the past quarter century have occurred in Uttar Pradesh.

“In 2014, when Modi’s ministers began to discuss the Namami Gange project, the details were vague and contradictory. Naturally, the sewers of Varanasi and the tanneries of Kanpur would receive special attention. The Ganges would become a “hub of spiritual tourism,” but there was also talk of building dams every sixty miles along the busiest stretch of the river, to facilitate the transport of heavy goods. Four battalions of soldiers would be organized into the Ganga Eco-Task Force. Local communities would join the effort...Major corporations had agreed to clean the surface of the river with trash-skimming machines and booms. The Tata Group, India’s largest conglomerate, would take on the stretch of river in Varanasi. But the success of Modi’s cleanup effort will ultimately depend on...bureaucrats such as Shashi Shekhar, the water-resources secretary Shekhar plans to build communal toilets in some of the poorest riverside villages. Women were especially keen on this idea, he said, since, for privacy, they customarily go out into the fields in the pre-dawn dark or after the evening meal, when they are vulnerable to snakebite and sexual assault.

“Some elements of the cleanup shouldn’t be difficult to execute. Sewage-treatment plants that are already under construction will be completed. Recently, Shekhar e-mailed me to say that work on cleaning the ghats in Varanasi, Kanpur, and Allahabad had begun on schedule; for a company with Tata’s resources, this is not a particularly challenging assignment. Shekhar also said that the government had spelled out the terms of what it called a “hybrid annuity” plan for payments to contractors working on the new sewage-treatment plants and other public-works projects. But will tinkering with financial incentives truly reduce bureaucracy and corruption, especially in parts of the country where state authorities aren’t under the control of Modi’s political party?

“Modi’s greatest asset may be his conviction that he can inspire change through sheer dynamism. But this may also be his biggest liability. “The expectation is so huge,” Shekhar said. “Even bureaucrats have the perception of him as Superman.” Shekhar acknowledged that Namami Gange would not fully restore the river. The hydropower dam at Tehri would remain, as would the nineteenth-century diversion canals. In lower stretches of the river, where the flow is already severely depleted, it will take decades to address the inefficient use of water for irrigation. Even so, he said, “never in the past has a government initiated a project of this magnitude. I am putting myself under great pressure as far as targets are concerned. But if you do not see high, you do not reach midway.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Library of Congress, CIA World Factbook, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Encyclopedia.com, Live Science, The Conversation, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Google AI, Wikipedia, The Guardian and various websites, books and other publications.

Last updated August 2026