“Water is the great sustainer like the mother.” – Taittriya Samhita
Hyderabad: Ecological violence is contagious much like indifference, which has become the norm of Indian society. The violence has become distilled opium- heroin, being pumped into our veins with needle named indifference. And yes, we love it. The two twins – violence and indifference, are enough to get a nation high on the path of planetary destruction. We have chopped up our mountain and catchment forests in this trance and Bharat has finally arrived at environment mayhem.
The cost, 7 lakh people die prematurely due to water pollution, while millions suffer from symptoms from dysentery to heavy metal poisoning. Our surface water resources shrink, and groundwater retreats into newer depths foretelling of water wars in the next decade.
With vanity younger Indian 'contractors' loot and destroy our rivers, her sandbanks, illegally steal gravel and mine the bedrocks. Meanwhile, the sententious older generation preaches duty as they forget they were the ones imbibed indifference within us. The government is not responsible for the pollution; it is the sins of the people – greed, callousness and putrefaction of the Indian soul.
Our society has embraced violence & indifference and sacrificed our mother Ganga. The river venerated as the living goddess, today is laden not with fertile silt and minerals, but a toxic mixture of garbage, billions of litres of faeces and untreated sewage entering the river, heavy metals, drug-resistant pathogens and death.
Ganga is the 4th most polluted rivers of the world, toxic not only for human beings but even for fishes and plants. There are reports from NYT to our government’s own assessments that make our mother Ganga a little less than malodorous sewage meandering across Gangetic plains.
A Ganga Yatra and awareness drive may be the first step to cure this problem, but it is a very far from the solution. Thousands of the crores have been spent already to save the Ganga, yet even today in Allahabad river waters, whatever little there is, is undrinkable.
I am reminded of the aftermath of the ardh Kumbh Mela in 2019, one of the biggest gathering of the Hindu faith, saw the whole city drenched in pathogen and waste rotting all along the river banks. There is no question on the faith of the millions of devotee, but is this faith in good faith?
The answer is tricky, but the truth is obvious. Misguided faith or rather lip service to faith has killed one of the largest rivers systems of the world in a matter of decades. A bath in the Ganga is cheap indulgence for the sinning mind. To care only for oneself and not the river is not Hinduism but egomaniacal perversion of Hinduism.
The Solution is also hard one which involves sacrifice. In good faith, we have to first regulate the holy dips in the river, especially in the upper regions of Uttarakhand. Sewage, which is 8-% of the pollution, needs to be immediately stopped. A national plan for Ganga conservation should pay special attention to effective sewage management especially in the upper tracts of the river. Currently, we can’t even stop wastes from rafting camps on the Ganga. We have to ensure purity at source, without an effective sewage management system, the river can never heal.
There is also a need to have an active portal that reports on water health all throughout the river, including on her tributaries. Next is step is to restore catchments areas of the Ganga. This means that all tributaries of Ganga, need to be declared as a national treasure any sand mining, rock mining or waste dumping should become a serious crime and harsh punishments need to be proposed. The rural police across states need to be sensitised on these issues, as water may even be more precious than gold in the very near future.
But the biggest polluters Industry needs stricter regulations and a new Clean Ganga tax. As part of the stricter regulations the Government needs to look at Norway or Sweden and their river policy. All polluting industries need to have a treatment plant on site and the state pollution board reports on water need to verified by a third party to have complete transparency in the matter.
CSR funds from major pollutant cities in the Ganga Basin need to be redistributed for rejuvenation activities. Eco-Entrepreneurs need to encouraged and ecological services should be valued and monetised. For example, if tanneries in a particular area cannot themselves setup a treatment plant, they can tie with these entrepreneurs to provide them with ecological services. Small pockets along the river need to be developed not as industry zones by green industry zones, exclusively for projects related to cleaning of water and encourage green zones along the river.
NGO and farmers around the Ganga, should be encouraged to adopt organic farming and the state governments need to subsidise the transition to organic farms. Ganga Organic can even be developed as a brand for consumers. Bihar government has undertaken a similar program called the Javik Setu, that needs to be emulated across the Gangetic plains.
To conclude the crisis of the Ganga or Yamuna or any other river for that matter is a crisis of faith. We as a society destroyed our culture and now reap the harvest of disease and pollution. A dead river represents a dead faith and a dead Hinduism. Our greed and our religion cannot co-exist. Either the river lives, with all sacredness within her or triumphs greed and ecological destruction. Money and government is not enough to clean the Ganga, only sacrifice and faith can heal our river. We need a Ganga Satyagraha to ensure the sense of duty is rekindled in our society.
Our life-giving mother rivers now spew poisons, and it’s all our doing. It is about time, we people of India and children of the river civilisations reclaim our sanity and love for our mothers – the rivers of India. One is reminded of the Garuda Purana-“Thousands of man’s sins get destroyed by the holy sight of the Ganges, and he becomes pure by the touch of the water of the Ganges, by consuming it, or just by pronouncing Ganga,”Such was the holiness and purity of our mother Ganga. It’s time we clean ourselves and our society of greed, selfishness and ecological violence and through good faith make the Ganga our holy mother again.
