After decades of futility, a charismatic civil engineer's campaign to clean the polluted river is poised for a breakthrough.
Yellow and gold marigolds drift slowly down the languid Ganges. Remnants of garlands, the flower heads add splashes of color to the turbid river that Hindus call Mother Ganga. The overwhelming fragrance, however, is the stench of sewage.
Downstream of this holiest of Hindu cities, Gopal Pandey dons a pair of rubber gloves and lowers a steel canister over the side of a motorboat. Methane bubbles rise to the surface of the murky water and burst silently. Nearly every week since 1992, Pandey, a technician here at Swatcha Ganga Research Laboratory, has sampled up and down Varanasi's famous ghats, the sets of broad stone steps along the riverbank that give pilgrims access to the water.
Pandey's ritual has changed little through the years. He hoists up the canister and with an old-fashioned glass pipette adds manganese sulfate and alkaline potassium iodide with azide to fix dissolved oxygen. Back in the lab, he'll measure oxygen content, fecal coliform bacteria, and other water-quality indicators. He knows what to expect. Every day, more than 200 million liters of sewage and industrial waste—much of it untreated—ooze into the Ganges from Varanasi. “The pollution is getting worse,” Pandey says. As he takes another sample, a goat carcass floats by. It's not uncommon to see human corpses that had been consigned to the river as well.
Although the Ganges is filthier than ever, a remedy for the ailing river may be at hand. This spring, India's central government is expected to give final approval for an innovative water-treatment scheme here. “If the project is successful, it would serve as a model for other cities and rivers in India,” says Steve Hamner, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman. “One single project is not going to solve all the problems of the Ganga River,” cautions A. K. Gosain, head of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. But the Varanasi solution will have an impact, he says, and as part of a $4 billion initiative to cleanse India's rivers by 2020, the government intends to replicate it in other cities on the Ganges.
The project should make an inroad against one of India's biggest killers: water-borne diarrheal illnesses. In 2004, Hamner and colleagues detected a notorious bacterium—Escherichia coli O157:H7—in Varanasi froth. Pandey routinely records fecal coliform counts of 1 million to 2 million per 100 milliliters off Varanasi—light-years beyond the 2500 per 100 ml that India has set as the maximum limit for safe bathing. Chromium from leather tanneries, toxic dyes from silk factories, and pesticides and other runoff from farm fields are also taking a toll on the ecology of the Ganges Basin, home to some 500 million people.
The water project will also mark a major milestone in a 30-year-long grassroots campaign to improve the river that began in Varanasi, one of the oldest inhabited cities on Earth. And it would be a personal triumph for the movement's charismatic 71-year-old leader, Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and mahant, or spiritual head, of Varanasi's Sankat Mochan Temple.
Dusk has fallen at a cluster of modest buildings at Tulsi Ghat, Mishra's home and office of the Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF). As worshippers clang bells, the heady aroma of sandalwood incense wafts into the “throne room.” Mishra is relaxing after a long day presiding over a ceremony at his temple, dedicated to the Hindu deity Hanuman. Devotees approach, reverently greet their mahant, and mumble prayers as they touch the edge of his white dhoti.
For 500 years, the mantle of mahant has passed from father to eldest son. When Mishra was 14, his father died. He embraced his fate—with a twist. At the time that he became Sankat Mochan's chief priest, Mishra was developing a fascination with physics and mathematics. “All the good students were going into engineering. I felt I should too,” he says. He earned a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering from Banaras Hindu University here and joined its faculty while continuing to serve as the temple's spiritual leader.
One day in 1966, the young professor became aware of the plight of the Ganges. At the confluence of the Ganges and the Assi River, Mishra observed thousands of dead fish sweeping into the Ganges. “I thought, ‘What is this?’” he says. “That's when I started worrying.” Authorities blamed industrial effluents. Little was done to rein in pollution, so Mishra began speaking out. In 1980, he visited the United States and met the folk singer Pete Seeger, who was then leading a campaign to clean up New York's Hudson River. The trip inspired Mishra and two colleagues to found SMF in 1982 “to raise awareness among the masses,” says one of the original trio, S. N. Upadhyay, a chemical engineer and director of the Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University.
Partly in response to SMF's campaign, in April 1985 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched the Ganga Action Plan (GAP). Its ambitious goal was to reduce Ganges pollution to levels safe for bathers. Over the next 15 years, GAP spent about $200 million improving sanitation in cities along the 2500-kilometer-long river and building facilities to pump wastewater into sludge-treatment ponds.
“The more money GAP spent, the more government agencies claimed that pollution was decreasing,” Upadhyay says. He and his SMF colleagues believed otherwise. “They were simply fooling the people,” Upadhyay says. States dragged their feet in implementing GAP projects, which ended up processing only a fraction of the wastewater. To back their criticisms with hard data, SMF leaders, with help from friends in Sweden, opened Swatcha Ganga Laboratory in 1992. They quickly confirmed, Mishra says, that “GAP's conventional solutions weren't working.” In Varanasi, pumps stopped during frequent electricity outages and during summer monsoon flooding. Fecal coliform counts were higher than ever.
“We became watchdogs,” Mishra says. SMF's advocacy brought him fame: Time recognized Mishra as a “Hero of the Planet” in 1999. Inside India, SMF's rising profile “put a lot of pressure on the government,” Mishra says. Soon after GAP funding wrapped up in 2000, a damning government audit concluded that the initiative “was not able to achieve its objectives.” Frazzled authorities challenged SMF: “They said, ‘Give us a solution,’” Mishra says. He responded that with a few homespun innovations, a wastewater treatment system pioneered in California in the 1960s could be adapted to the challenges of India—and Varanasi.
A simple plan
As dawn breaks, Mother Ganga comes to life. Standing on the submerged steps of a ghat, young men, their faces daubed with yellow powder, splash each other playfully. Nearby, a rail-thin elderly man dips his toothbrush into the Ganges and thrusts it into his mouth. At a “burning ghat,” flames lick from wooden biers. The oil-drenched legs of a corpse being cremated strike a pose eerily similar to someone splayed out on a poolside chaise longue. Half-burned bodies are not an uncommon sight in the river, Mishra says.
In Varanasi, approximately 60,000 pilgrims and residents bathe in the Ganges every day. In a recent health survey, Hamner and colleagues recorded high rates of cholera, dysentery, and other waterborne maladies in Varanasi. Poor sanitation in 2006 cost India about $53.8 billion in economic losses, or 6.4% of GDP.
Mishra scoffs at the idea that devout Hindus are tainting the Ganges. Such nonpoint sources, he says, contribute about 5% of waterborne pollution here. As SMF has documented, most filth comes from 30 point sources—sewer outfalls, drainage channels, and the like—along the city's 7-kilometer-long riverbank.
SMF's solution is the Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond System, the brainchild of the University of California, Berkeley's, William Oswald, now deceased. In this “engineered natural system,” as Mishra calls it, waste spends 5 weeks passing through four kinds of pools (see diagram, above) that strip out organic matter and kill off parasite eggs and fecal coliform bacteria. Reclaimed water can be used for irrigation, and methane produced in the anaerobic pond would be used to generate energy to run the facility. SMF found a promising spot to build the plant at an oxbow depression several kilometers downstream of Varanasi.
To adapt the system to Varanasi, SMF proposed a tunnel that would use gravity rather than pumps to move wastewater to the oxbow site. In 1997, SMF presented the concept to the central government—which opted to stick with the GAP approach. Although Vinod Tare, a civil engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, says he has “no doubt” that the innovative system will work, a drawback is that it would require “as much or more land” as existing options and, he says, would not be any cheaper. Mishra insists it would cost less, although his arguments didn't cut ice with the government. “But we were persistent and resilient,” he says.
Prospects brightened in November 2007, when Mishra met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “He said that cleaning the Ganga should be a priority,” Mishra says. Singh also championed a holistic basinwide approach—“a drastic change” from GAP's piecemeal approach, Gosain says. In response to a government request, SMF, working with GO2 Water, a Kensington, California–based company founded by Oswald and Berkeley colleague F. Bailey Green, drew up plans for a pilot plant in Varanasi able to process 37 million liters of sewage per day. If the pilot project proves its mettle, similar facilities would be built in Allahabad, Kanpur, and Patna.
The National Ganga River Basin Authority, launched in 2009, has boldly pledged to stop the flow of untreated sewage and industrial waste into the Ganges, from beginning to end. “That will get rid of 95% of the river's pollution,” Mishra says. Time is not on their side. As India's population grows and its economy flourishes, the pressures on the Ganges are growing more intense. “If we will lose the battle against pollution, I don't know what will happen to the people of the Ganga Basin,” says Mishra, who believes that the next 5 years will be critical to the river's future.
After decades of futile efforts to purify the Ganges, that's a tight deadline. Mishra insists he is not frustrated by the lack of progress to date. But even the patience of a mahant grows thin. The time has come, Mishra says sternly, “to stop disrespecting Mother Ganga.”
