$200-Million Project Planned to Rid It of Pollution : India to Cleanse Its Holy River--the 1,500-Mile-Long Ganges

The mighty river runs strong this fall morning, propelled by the runoff from the monsoon rains that succor and nourish India.

It runs swiftly past the aged Brahmin as he dips his hands into its waters and lifts them, letting the thin stream fall back into his sacred Ganges.

It moves on past the pilgrim--from Bombay or Madras or Bangalore or some other distant place--who has come here to bathe in the holy waters, just as the Muslim is drawn to Mecca or the Jew to the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem.

Long before the light of dawn the river banks come alive with the devout who would live in no other place, with the visitor fulfilling the wish of a lifetime and with the poor who have nowhere else to go to clean and relieve themselves.

Unseen Changes

Life on the Ganges at Varanasi, or Benares as it is known to many, has not changed for centuries, or so it seems in the dim light of the predawn.

But the Ganges is changing in unseen ways. Like much else in India, the holy river has finally become vulnerable to the human drive to propagate and create a better lot.

The Ganges, put simply, is choking on the sewage, industrial wastes, pesticides and uncounted other pollutants that almost 300 million Indians put into it daily.

Although they are only one-third of India’s population, the people who depend on this single river system are more numerous than the population of the United States, and nearly as many as those of Western Europe.

$200-Million Cleanup

Its 1,500-mile length drains a basin of almost 350,000 square miles, covers 26% of the country’s land mass and carries a quarter of the nation’s water wealth.

No single problem puts into focus the enormous challenges that population pressures pose than the government’s decision a year ago to try to clean up its sacred river.

After months of planning, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi came here in June and placed his personal stamp and prestige behind a massive $200-million project to do to the Ganges what Britain has done to the Thames.

But, as project director Nilay Chaudhuri notes, “No country in the world has ventured to clean up a river the size equal or near equal to the Ganges. The Thames of the United Kingdom or the Rhine of the Federal Republic of Germany . . . where national cleaning efforts were made are no match for the Ganges.”

Enormous Challenge

Chaudhuri’s is the scientist’s view of the challenge. To the prime minister, it is something more: “The Ganga (as the river is reverently called) binds us together. It makes us one civilization, one nation,” Gandhi said here June 14 as he inaugurated the Ganges project.

“The purity of the Ganges has never been in doubt. Yet we have allowed the pollution of this river, which is the symbol of our spirituality . . . from now on, we shall put a stop to all this. We shall see that the waters of the Ganga become clean once again.”

To men like superintending engineer G. C. Bhatia and Varanasi project director Y. N. Chaturvedi, the rhetorical sweep of politicians based in New Delhi is far away, while Varanasi’s ancient, decrepit sewage system is very much a reality.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” says Bhatia with the engineer’s eye for structural elegance, as he watches thousands of gallons of raw sewage flow over a brick-terraced outfall into the Ganges from the city’s main drainage line. “They really knew how to build something back then, didn’t they?”

Improvements Needed

“Back then” was 1917, when Varanasi was little more than one-tenth its current size and flush toilets were a perquisite of Britain’s colonial elite.

Today the same system serves a city of 1.1 million and does little more than it did 70 years ago--collecting a portion of the city’s sewage and, for part of the year, dumping it untreated right back into the river, albeit below the built-up area.

When it is working, a diversion pump sends the untreated sewage down an irrigation canal for use by local farmers.

If all goes as envisioned by Bhatia and his boss, Chaturvedi, by 1990 the outfall will be slowed to a trickle or halted altogether and Varanasi’s 38 million gallons a day of raw sewage will be diverted into a French-engineered treatment plant.

Dream, Nightmare

It is an engineer’s dream and an engineer’s nightmare, encompassing this nation’s hopes of catapulting itself into the ranks of modern industrial states.

India is a nation where symbols mean a great deal, and there is no more politically telling symbol today than the Ganges River project.

India also remains a predominantly rural society, at least as measured in percentage terms, with about two-thirds of the population living in villages. But the one-third living in cities adds up to almost 250 million people and is growing, giving the country urban problems on a scale unimagined in western societies that have vast resources to tackle them.

India’s annual per-capita gross national product is less than $250. And Varanasi is not the only city dumping its wastes into the Ganges.

Swelling Population

Along its course lie 27 metropolitan areas with populations in excess of 100,000 each. At least four are conglomerates of more than 1 million, including the urban nightmare of them all, Calcutta, where the Ganges, there called the Hugli, flows into the Bay of Bengal.

It is these 27 cities that are the focus of the first stage of the massive cleanup campaign.

Of the 27, no sewage gathering system whatsoever exists in 15 and only 6 have even partial treatment facilities.

Officials believe that by controlling untreated municipal wastes they will control three-fourths of the river’s pollutants, and they estimate that almost 90% of the municipal waste comes from the 27 larger cities.

New Sewage System

In Varanasi, the project is beginning with the biggest, and in a sense, the easiest problem--the sewage system. In addition to building a treatment plant, it also is necessary to stop water from the storm sewer system from flowing directly into the river as it has been doing at five points adjacent to the most heavily used ghats , the gathering areas for bathers.

These sewers carry not only surface water but also much of the city’s household sewage as residents have illegally tapped into the lines over the years. Five pumps built several years ago but never used have been refurbished and brought under the control of state instead of municipal authorities.

The stations, like the project as a whole, are a symbol, but this time a symbol of much that has been wrong with local government in this country.

The illegal tapping of the storm system, the pumps that were built but never used, the assertion of state over local powers--all are symptomatic of a deep malaise in the planning and delivery of local services, a malaise that has provoked an equally deep cynicism in those who are supposed to receive those services.

Necessary Resources

“It’s easy to point a finger at local governments that don’t get things done,” says an observer of urban problems, “but this country has always looked up and not down when it comes to government, and we never have properly defined the powers of local officials or given them the resources to do their jobs.”

For Chaturvedi, however, the return of the pumps to his care evokes a different spirit, an example, in a sense, of what can happen when an official with determination is given the resources and the control over a problem.

“I designed and built those five pumping stations, and when I see people confident enough to bathe in the Ganga right at the mouth of one of the stations, it makes me proud,” he says.

“Now that people have seen that we can do something, that the pumps can work, people are beginning to believe that it can be done. Now we get a call if the pump is not working for a minute.”

Three-Year Project

When a full system is working three years from now, according to the plan, the storm sewers will be blocked at the river’s edge and the water forced back into the main sewer system, which then will be connected to a treatment plant that in turn will not only provide treated water for irrigation but also bio-gas byproducts for sale.

Even then, however, the system will not be complete, since the city’s growth has already outstripped the capacity of the existing system and the engineers are drawing up proposals for new lines.

During the monsoon season, when the Ganges can rise as much as 21 feet, the current sewer system is simply overwhelmed and effluents go straight into the river.

The sewer systems and industrial pollutants, in a sense, are the easy part of the project. They are the standard stuff of government.

Religious Obstacle

But Varanasi is a holy city, a gathering spot for hundreds if not thousands of years, where the faithful have come to partake of a holy river that is believed to be of the gods, a river whose waters alone can bring release from a never-ending cycle of reincarnation. To be cremated at Varanasi and have one’s ashes strewn in the river is to liberate the soul forever.

Public officials tread lightly when encountering such beliefs.

Rising just adjacent to one of the two sites along the river where bodies are cremated is the foundation for an electric crematory, designed to do efficiently what the traditional wood fires often do not, adding considerably to the river’s woes.

The crematory, which officials hope to have in operation in a year, has been bitterly opposed by the traditional operators of the burning ghats , but officials seem to have won support by persuading people that the old ways will still be available.

Strong Traditions

Whether they will be as successful with another source of pollution that also carries religious significance remains to be seen:

“There are 1,436 Shiva temples in Varanasi, and all must be washed with fresh milk in the morning. Fresh milk means there must be cows, and preferably black cows,” says one official.

“Then there are the bulls. Lord Shiva by tradition rode a bull. So many rich people, when they come here once in a lifetime, offer a . . . bull to the city to propitiate the belief.”

The result is a lot of cattle, animals that need to be washed and whose dung and carcasses are thrown into the river. While officials talk of creating cattle sheds and using home guards to keep people from throwing carcasses into the river, there is an air of resignation in their voices, as if to say there are some areas where public policy may have to bend.

V.B. Mishra, a professor of engineering at Benares Hindu University and leader of one of the city’s most prominent temples, thinks people will listen if the right appeal is made. He faults officials for not turning first to the people of Varanasi in planning for the future.

“They run big advertisements saying these millions will be spent to clean up the Ganges, so people think that with all that money, it just will be done,” he says.

“If people are shown and told, they will understand. If you just say the river is God, they will say it is not possible to pollute God. But if you say, ‘Should someone defecate in the holy river, or spit in the holy river?’ they will say no.”

It is not that Mishra opposes the Ganges project--he thinks it is vital--but he says it simply isn’t going to be enough. “They claim they are cleaning the whole river, but when the plans are examined, it is really only a few cities,” he charges. “The problem is managing all the water resources of the Ganges basin.”

Problems Predicted

If so much water is siphoned off upstream for irrigation that the flow is critically depleted, pollution controls will be ineffective, he charges, saying that conflicting claims on water resources must be sorted out.

Similarly, he contends that it is shortsighted to tackle only the existing cities when India’s population is growing as fast as it is. By the time the existing large cities and towns have treatment facilities, many more will have reached the critical stage.

For others, however, it is an exciting prospect that anything at all is being done, especially a project that is so visible and so full of meaning for the whole country that it could provide the impetus for other public officials.