What is dumped in the river Ganges? Raw sewage, plastic bags and bottles, industrial effluents, human waste, chemicals from tanneries, discarded idols, cow dung, partially cremated corpses, garlands of flowers, human remains, animal carcasses, butcher’s offal, chemical dyes from sari factories and construction waste.

It only takes a few hours of being in the ancient holy city of Varanasi – the most sacred place in the world for Hindus – to realise that the question needs to be reworded as “what is not dumped in the Ganges?” 

On an overcast, but oppressively humid, August day, India’s holiest river is the colour of pewter and swollen from the monsoon rains, which have raised the water level to cover some of the famous ghats – the long stretch of steps leading down to the river.

At Assi Ghat, named after the river Assi, which flows into the Ganges near this spot, a herd of buffalo has been brought by their owner to cool off in the river. Submerged up to their backs, they stand, still as statues, in the same water that locals and pilgrims will bathe in.

The Assi river has been reduced to this,” says Virender Nishad, a seventh generation boatman, pointing to a three-metre wide drain, full of sludge, plastic and litter. “If nothing changes, the Ganges will become like this too in 20 or 30 years. If we go on polluting it, the river will be ruined and so will we.”

Nishad represents that curious paradox found all over India – everyone knows what the problem is and how it should be fixed but somehow it never is. The will to act is missing, in ordinary people, in the government.

Nishad has grown up on the ghats. Now 30, he has seen the river he regards as a living deity become indescribably dirty. “When I was a boy, I used to drink the water. It used to be much cleaner and fast-flowing,” he says.

But his memories have probably been sanitised by time because it was almost 30 years ago that the Indian government launched its first huge clean-up project so the river cannot have been as clean as Nishad remembers.

ver the decades, numerous campaigns to clean the Ganges have come and gone. Billions of dollars have been thrown into the river. Good intentions have been felled by corruption and mismanagement. The pollution and its causes have been dissected ad nauseam. Yet it is filthier than ever.

The Ganges flows for 2500 kilometres from the Himalayas through four states where 400 million Indians live through to the east coast where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. As it passes through 100 towns and cities, it absorbs all their human and industrial waste.

Experts estimate that more than 3000 million litres of untreated sewage from these towns along the Ganges are pumped into the river every day. By the time it reaches Varanasi, whose untreated sewage (or most of it) is also pumped into the waters, it becomes a sewer and the sixth most polluted river in the world.

Dr Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, a university professor whose family has been temple priests here for 13 generations, says that 33 sites in the city continually discharge raw sewage into the river. 

By Amrit Dhillon  (posted by Anthappan)