Ganges River

“The Ganges Basin and its downstream delta, covering an area of roughly 1.2 million km 2 and home to more than 500 million people living in China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh, is the most populous river system in the world. People liv- ing in the region have long coped with the extreme temporal and spatial climatic variability that characterizes the South Asian monsoon, and continue to be highly exposed to its irregularities today... Due to the confluence of geographic and climatic features (e.g. exposure to high rates of sea level rise and tropical storms), low development, and high population density and freshwater dependence, downstream portions of the basin have been listed among the world's most vulnerable to climate change. Meanwhile, remoteness, high slopes, thin soils and climatic variability also render its mountainous regions vulnerable to disturbance.”

“In 1970 the main occupation of Tajpur was fishing. Today, pollution has greatly reduced the number of fish in the Ganga. Also, the fine nylon net, introduced in the last ten years, brings in only finger fish and spawn. The traditional cotton net was coarse and caught only big fish: rohu, tangra, gaunch, bam (eel) and gagra. In 1970, half of Tajpur lived on fishing; today [2015] there are only four fishermen. In time, they too will abandon the profession.”

In the upper Ganga there are 95 aquatic birds species, in the middle Ganga 162 species, in the Ganges-Padma River in Bangladesh 159 species, and in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh 254 species. “The river and its sandbanks have a distinctive avifauna that is increasingly threatened by declining dry season flows, human disturbance and conversion to crops. Several species dependent on this system for nesting have declined in recent decades, resulting in River Tern being categorized as near-threatened and Black-bellied Tern as endangered, while one species – Pink-headed Duck, whose stronghold was the mid-lower Ganga wetlands – is already probably extinct.”

“The water quality of Ganga river at Allahabad and Varanasi, two holy places where millions take a dip, is most unfit for bathing purposes... Water becomes unfit for bathing if the biochemical oxygen demand (BoD) level exceeds 3 mg per litre... the BoD level at Allahabad was 6.4, it was 3.4 at Varanasi, 4.5 at Kanpur and 3.9 at Kannauj, making the Ganga unfit for bathing, what to talk about drinking.” “The biggest culprit is domestic sewage. According to Indian government figures compiled by the Centre for Science and Environment, an advocacy group based in New Delhi, 2.7 million liters per day of sewage is generated by the 50 cities along its banks.... The same agency categorizes 764 ‘grossly polluted' factories, including chemical plants, slaughterhouses and textile factories. Additionally, the loss of freshwater flow into the river from hydroelectric dams and agricultural irrigation means that some stretches of the river receive no freshwater flow during winter and summer months – only wastewater... Sewage treatment plants have been built in cities all along the river, but many don't operate at full capacity because of a lack of electricity.”

“From the Himalayas to the Malabar Coast, the word Ganga designates, in sacred texts and everyday lives, a terrestrial, earth-bound river and a celestial flow ofpurifying waters. Ganga is a general term for what everyone would agree constitutes a river. For there is no denying the fact that it is indeed a large flow of water,streaming across the land and emptying into the ocean. But the nature of that flowof water (is it natural or artificial if it is dammed?) and its properties (is it pure ordefiled if it is full of sewerage?) defines how people name it and how they use it.”

“India is embarking on an expensive last-ditch attempt to restore the heavily polluted Ganges River basin, home to 400 million people. The cleanup will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. The World Bank, which has already ponied up $1 billion in loans and grants, classifies it as ‘high' risk... Fixing the river will also require more efficient agricultural practices. One of the biggest factors in the Ganges' decline is the volume of water diverted to irrigation: a whopping 90 percent... Then there's tradition. Millions of Hindu pilgrims will have to be persuaded to cease dumping idols, beads and corpses in the river. These practices account for five percent of the river's pollution.”

“The Ganga dolphin was declared India's national aquatic animal in 2009, and the government approved a National Dolphin Action Plan in 2010 to save the highly endangered freshwater mammal. What has happened since then? ‘Not very much,' admitted Ravi Singh, chief executive officer of WWF-India... the Ganga dolphin is one of only three freshwater dolphins left in the world... There are about 1,800 left in the Indian part of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, down from about 4,500 as recently as 1982. There may be around 600 more left in Bangladesh, and a few in Nepal, all part of the same basin. In Bhutan, the fourth country in the basin, the Ganga dolphin has not been seen for many years.”

“Water withdrawal poses a serious threat to the Ganges. In India, barrages control all of the tributaries to the Ganges and divert roughly 60% of river flow to large scale irrigation. India controls the flow of the Ganges into Bangladesh with over 30 upstream water diversions. The largest, the Farraka Barrage, 18 km from the border of Bangladesh, reduced the average monthly discharge of the Ganges from 2,213 m3/s to a low of 316m3/s.n. Climate change will exacerbate the prob- lems caused by water extraction. The Himalayan glaciers are estimated to supply 30-40% of the water in the Ganges, which is particularly critical in the dry season prior to the monsoon rains... Overall, excessive water diversions threaten to eliminate natural flows and severely damage people's livelihoods in the Ganges.”

“The Gangetic rivers erode a large amount of sediments from the upstream Himalayan region, deposit a part of this in the alluvial plains and finally dump a significant amount of sediments in the Bay of Bengal. A recent work on sediment shows that the Ganga river annually erodes around 794 million tonnes of sediments (90% from the Himalaya), brings around 729 million tonnes at Farakka, and finally, 95 million tonnes are dumped in the ocean. Thus, the floodplain of the Ganga river receives around 65 million tonnes of sediments annually.”

‘The Ganga? Greatest of all rivers?' They would rise up, provoked beyond endurance by my mischievous phrasings. ‘But, Saar, many rivers are longer than our Ganga: the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Yangtze.' And then I would produce my secret treasure, a present sent to me by a former student — a map of the sea-floor, made by geologists. In the reversed relief of this map they would see with their own eyes that the Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along the floor of the bay... ‘Look comrades, look,' I would say. ‘This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. But them together and you have what is by far the greatest of earth's rivers.'

“Ten years of the Ganga Action Plan had not produced the results they expected... from the point of view of many residents, they had not significantly improved the wastewater problems in the city [Banaras] and in the Ganga.”

“It is noteworthy that whereas the Amarkantak forests are largely intact, the forests of Sidhi District, in the Son basin have come under heavy pressure, largely because of open cast mining of coal. This has very seriously affected the viability of the Gopad and the Banas rivers, giving rise of drought which has brought acute suffering to the people of the region. This is an object lesson of how a so-called development programme, coal mining and the setting up of large thermal power stations can cause permanent damage to the landscape, and substantially increase human misery. That this is likely to be compounded can be forecast, because the Ganga basin is rich in minerals such as bauxite, limestone and coal, whose exploitation has almost completely devastated the Kaimur hills. As late as 1973 the hills and valleys of the Gopad and Banas rivers were a visual delight and rivers ran clear and sweet with pale crystalline water. Today the hills are barren, the forests are gone and the rivers are dry water courses except during the rains, when they run cocoa brown with silt.”

“There may be a scientific as well as religious basis for beliefs that this river can bring purification. According to environmental engineer D.S. Bhargava, the Ganga decomposes organic waste 15 to 25 times faster than other rivers. This finding has never been fully explained. The Ganga has an extraordinary high rate of reaera- tion (the process by which it absorbs atmospheric oxygen), and it can retain dissolved oxygen much longer than water from other rivers. This could explain why bottled water from the Ganga reportedly does not putrefy even after many years of storage.”