From Wired Magazine, November 30:
The Ganges river is one of the world’s most sacred waterways—and one of its most polluted. To restore it, India is undertaking one of the biggest engineering programs in the history of sanitation.
In the mornings in Varanasi, the air on the banks of the Ganges fills with the scent of burning bodies. On the steps of the Manikarnika ghat—the holiest of the city’s stepped riverbanks, upon which Hindu dead are cremated—the fires are already lit, and mourners assemble by the hundred to accompany their loved ones at the end. Pyres of sandalwood (for the rich) and mango wood (for everyone else) are already burning; on one, a corpse wrapped in white is visible in the flames.
Down at the river, where I’m watching from a boat, some families are engaged in the ceremonial washing of their dead, the corpses shrouded in white linen and decorated with flowers. A few meters away, a man from another family (usually, the honor is bestowed on the eldest son) wades into the water, casting in the ashes of an already cremated relative so that the Ganges might carry their spirit onwards to the next life or even moksha, the end of the rebirth cycle, and transcendence.
The funeral ceremonies, held against the backdrop of the ancient city, are undeniably beautiful; but the same can’t be said of the river itself. The water’s surface is flaked with ashes; ceremonial flowers linger in the eddies. Just downstream, a couple of men are diving for discarded jewelry. Not 50 meters upstream, another group, having finished their rites, are bathing in the filthy water. An older man, clad in white, finishes his bathing with a traditional blessing: He cups the fetid Ganges water in one hand and takes a sip.
The Ganges is one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, providing water for an estimated 600 million people. But to Hindus, it is more than a waterway: It is Ma Ganga, the mother river, formed—according to the sacred text the Bhagavata Purana—when Lord Vishnu himself punctured a hole in the universe and divine water flooded into the world. Water from the Ganges is widely used in Hindu prayer and ceremony; you can buy plastic bottles of it from stalls all over the subcontinent—or order one on Amazon in the UK for as little as £3.
And yet despite its sacred status, the Ganges is one of the most contaminated major rivers on earth. The UN has called it “woefully polluted.” As India’s population has exploded—in April 2023, it overtook China to become the world’s most populous country—hundreds of millions of people have settled along the Ganges’ floodplain. India’s sanitation system has struggled to keep up. The Ganges itself has become a dumping ground for countless pollutants: toxic pesticides, industrial waste, plastic, and, more than anything, billions upon billions of liters of human effluent.
It’s March 2022, and I’ve come to India while reporting my book, Wasteland, about the global waste industry. And few issues in waste are more critical (yet less sexy) than sanitation. In the global north, sewage is a problem that many of us assumed was more or less fixed in Victorian times. But access to clean water and adequate sanitation remains an urgent global issue. Some 1.7 billion people worldwide still do not have access to modern sanitation facilities.
Every day, an estimated 494 million people without access to flushing toilets and closed sewers are forced to defecate in the open, in gutters, or in plastic bags. The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 people consumes wastewater (aka sewage) every year, either via unclean drinking water or contaminated food. In India, the result is that 37 million people are thought to be affected by water-borne illnesses such as typhoid, dysentery, and hepatitis every year. Worldwide, poor sanitation kills more children annually than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.
Sanitation is one of those amenities that most of us in the global north don’t think about until something goes wrong. In the UK, sewers have lately dominated news headlines for the wrong reasons: Many of Britain’s rivers and beaches are being polluted by sewage overflow and farming runoff. According to the UK’s Environment Agency, water companies discharged sewage into English rivers on 301,091 occasions in 2022, totaling more than 1.7 million hours; on Britain’s beaches, sewage is reportedly making swimmers sick. Britain’s sanitation woes have been caused by years of neglect: systemic underinvestment by profit-chasing ownership; austerity-starved and ineffectual regulation; and the ever-widening expansion of our concrete urban spaces, which divert water away from natural soaks like soil and wetlands and into our watercourses.
In India—like much of the global south—the issue is the opposite: In most cases, the sewers were never there in the first place. In this respect, the Ganges’ pollution is a strange mark of success. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, among the first things he did was launch the Clean India Campaign, a nationwide effort to install sanitation and modern waste facilities in a country that had previously lacked them.
Even those critical of Modi’s government—denounced for alleged Islamophobic policies and oppression of the press, among many other things—have to admit that the numbers since have been astonishing. Between 2014 and 2019, by one official estimate, India installed 110 million toilets, providing sanitation for an estimated half a billion people. Little more than a decade ago, India was known for having the highest rate of open defecation (that is, shitting in the open) in the world. Thanks to this massive expansion of public and private toilets, that rate has reportedly plummeted. The issue is that with so many new toilets, the sewage needs to go somewhere.
In that sense, India is like many rapidly urbanizing countries in the global south. But India is also unique, in that Hindu culture places rivers at the center of religious beliefs. And it’s for this reason the Modi government, alongside its Clean India Campaign, launched an expensive infrastructure plan to clean up the national river: the Namami Gange (“Obeisance to the Ganges”) program. It is by no means the first attempt. Previous governments have been launching “‘action plans”’ to clean the Ganges since at least the 1980s. But past efforts, beset by alleged corruption and mismanagement, rarely got far....
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