The Ganges: Public Health Nightmare (Short Essay)

The Ganges River of northern India may be the most polluted body of water in the world. It may also have the greatest variety of pollutants. Some of them are toxic byproducts of industry: “pharmaceutical companies, electronics plants, textile and paper industries, tanneries, fertilizer manufacturers and oil refineries discharge effluent into the river. This hazardous waste includes hydrochloric acid, mercury and other heavy metals, bleaches and dyes, pesticides, and polychlorinated biphenyls … Runoff from farms in the Ganges basin adds chemical fertilizers and pesticides such as DDT.” Most of them, however, are organic. In Varanasi alone, the river swallows the remains of 40,000 human corpses a year—some cremated, some partially cremated, and some whole—not to mention the dead cattle. Worst yet is the daily dump of hundreds of million gallons of raw sewage. Fecal coliform counts are dangerously high, 100 times the government’s acceptable standard for bathing according to one source and 67000 times according to another. People who use this water risk hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, amoebic dysentery, other waterborne diseases, and a variety of skin afflictions.

Despite these dangers, however, the Ganges, or Ganga in the vernacular, is the most desired destination in India. In Varanasi alone, an average of 60,000 people a day immerse themselves in the river. During the Kumbh Mela festival every several years, millions of pilgrims (estimates vary from 20 million to an incredible 70 million) make their way to Allahabad, another riverside city, for a ritual bath. So many unwashed bodies, of course, add even more contaminants to the water. Nevertheless, many even drink it and carry bottles back to their relatives.

Needless to say, this is a public health crisis. One of the unspoken lessons of the course so far is that public health situations, like all social or environmental situations, are part of a complex web of causes and effects, none of which is an independent variable. Some of them are common and predictable, and some of them are strange and surprising. The economic causes of the Ganges pollution are what you might expect. A century of booming population in India has concentrated in cities near the river. Infrastructure is weak, and the government lacks the resources to clean the water: for example, electricity is scarce, and the sewage pumps and water treatment plants suffer frequent power failures. Many citizens have no access to any other water source, either because they can’t afford it or because it simply isn’t available.

There are, however, some interesting religious and cultural causes for this crisis as well. According to Indian mythology, the Mother Ganges is a goddess who long ago descended from the sky to resurrect the ashes of an ancient king’s ancestors. Now, any Hindu who dips in or drinks from her, especially at the holy city of Varanasi, is freed from a great deal of karmic debt. Anyone whose remains are scattered in her escapes immediately from the cycle of reincarnation. And she is the most respectful resting place for the carcasses of holy cows.

These beliefs have a powerful grip on Hindu minds, powerful enough in many cases to neutralize warnings of health risks. Christians aren’t the only ones for whom science and faith are at odds! Some pilgrims are simply unaware of the river’s pollution, or even unaware of the microbial origins of disease. Many refuse to believe that holy water can be dangerous, despite the evidence. “‘Ganga is my mother, it could never harm me,’ says Hanuman Sahani, a lifetime boatman … [who] uses the water—straight from the river—for worship, but also to drink and brush his teeth.” Others are willing to take the physical risks, which they consider insignificant next to the spiritual benefits. Or sometimes even social benefits: a friend of mine, an American Christian, jumped in to show solidarity with his Hindu friends. And for whatever reason, a number of Western tourists, presumably educated ones, enter the water every year. All of this shows that informing and warning people may not be enough to keep them from hazardous behaviors, even those that we think are avoidable. Sometimes dogma yields to pragmatism: this January a group of sadhus (holy men) threatened to boycott the Kumbh Mela unless the government did something about the water conditions. The government settled on a temporary solution, “ordering Uttar Pradesh officials to release 1500 cubic feet per second of water every day from the Arora dam.” Yet even without this measure, most Hindus would have continued doing what they have always done.

If a river this polluted ran through the United States, the government would almost certainly have kept people out of it, by force if necessary. This is not an option for the Indian government. Although it is a secular democracy, most of its officials are Hindus. And even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. The consequences breaking a millennia-old tradition by fencing off the holiest pilgrimage site in the world would be unthinkable. Furthermore, Indians tend to be proud of their culture and have a strong sense of honor, and one of the consequences is that the government tends to conceal or downplay its problems. This is why the only accurate reports of water quality come from private organizations. The Ganga Action Plan, initiated in 1985, tried to set up water treatment systems and to target polluting industries, but its measures all failed for a variety of reasons. Since then the government has made little to no attempt to warn people about the river’s dangers. Furthermore, probably because of Hinduism’s influence, Indian culture has less of a sense of civic action and cooperation, commitment to the public good, and responsibility for shared resources than Western culture. This may be why nobody in particular feels personally responsible to keep the river clean.

Interestingly, some Indian intellectuals have found one at least partially effective strategy to keep people out of the Ganges. It involves sensitivity to people’s religious sensibilities. You could call it an integration of faith and learning. One activist explains that “to tell a Hindu that Ganga, goddess and mother, is “polluted” or “dirty” is an insult; it suggests that she is no longer sacred. Rather, the approach must acknowledge that human action, not the holy river herself, is responsible: ‘We are allowing our mother to be defiled.’” Another activist simply “explains to devout Hindus that Mother Ganges is not feeling well. She can be cured by eradicating pollution.”