Saving the Ganga will be difficult, but it can be done
Solutions lie within reach when officials, politicians and citizens are motivated by a common desire to do good
On a hot April day in 2014, a fervent crowd of t housands surged through the streets of Varanasi to cheer Narendra Modi, who went on to win a sweeping general victory at the head of the BJP. Modi was looking for votes, but he had more than politics on his mind that day: he was also thinking about the plight of the sacred but heavily polluted Ganga that flows by his Varanasi constituency.
“When I was coming to this city I thought the BJP was sending me, but after I came here I felt Mother Ganga had called me,” he told the crowd. When he became prime minister, Modi warmed to his theme. “From her source to her end, Ma Ganga is screaming for help. She is saying, ‘There must be one of my sons who will come and pull me out of this filth’,” he said. “There are many tasks that perhaps God has set for me.”
More than three years later, it is reasonable to ask why so little has been achieved in the cleaning of the Ganga and its tributaries (including the Yamuna that runs through Delhi), despite the evident passion of the PM for the task.
Saving the Ganga, after all, is not a controversial project. While other economic, social and religious programmes pursued by Modi and his supporters have been attacked as pointless or even inflammatory, there is no such objection to the saving of a river from pollution by sewage or industrial waste. It is true that it is India’s Hindus who worship Ganga as a purifying goddess, but Muslims and Buddhists also depend on its waters. Muslim sultans and emperors relished the Ganga’s water for drinking, and Akbar called it “the water of immortality”. In his 2014 election campaign, Modi himself talked of GangaJamuni tehzeeb (Ganga-yamuna culture), a riverine phrase used to describe the dual Hindu-muslim culture of north India.
There is, furthermore, a triple benefit to all India from cleaning the Ganges aside from any spiritual advantage arising from the rescue of the holy river: a successful clean-up would help the country’s beleaguered natural environment; it would create hundreds of thousands of badly-needed jobs; and – through improved sanitation – it would save the lives of the hundreds of children who die needlessly each day from diarrhoea and other preventable ailments. Again, there is no need for party-political controversy over this kind of plan. Shashi Tharoor of Congress initially supported Modi’s Swachh Bharat drive, although he later criticised the campaign’s ineffectiveness.
But the fact that Modi’s aims for the Ganga are uncontroversial makes it all the more disturbing that so little has been done so far, especially when you consider the ready availability of crores of rupees from India and foreign sources to finance a clean-up.
At worst this lack of action is a failure, and at best it is a damaging delay, and it shows how hard it is for any central government – even one with a strong popular mandate such as Modi’s - to run democratic India effectively. Corrupt state governments, feeble regulators and institutions, and the absence of effective municipal authorities have left sewage treatment plants unbuilt or poorly maintained (even where toilets have been installed), while the country’s rivers are still sullied with industrial filth from factories large and small, and the bureaucrats and contractors responsible are rarely held to account.
Yet we should not despair. If Uttar Pradesh can organise the Kumbh Mela as it did in Allahabad in 2013 to host the largest gathering of humans on earth (more than 70 million bathed at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna and the legendary Saraswati); if West Bengal can accommodate over a million pilgrims at the annual Ganga Sagar celebration at the river’s mouth; and if both these state governments can arrange effective sanitation, running water, electricity, policing and garbage disposal – then it shows that more permanent solutions lie within reach when officials, politicians and citizens are motivated by a common desire to do good.
Nor is India the first country to be afflicted with river pollution. As Modi knows – because he has discussed the matter with President Barack Obama when they met in 2014 and with others since then – the Chicago River in the US, the Thames in London and the Rhine in continental Europe were all at one time dead or dying as a result of sewage and industrial effluent. All have since been restored, and India is eager to learn the lessons of how these clean-ups were achieved. Saving the Ganga will be difficult, but it can be done in our lifetime.