Ganges

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ganges rises in the western Himalayas, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and runs 2,525 km before it empties into the Bay of Bengal. Along the way it changes its name twice. In India it is the Ganga. In Bangladesh it becomes the Padma. Near Varanasi, the levels of fecal coliform bacteria from human waste run more than 100 times above the Indian government's official limit. The same water that carries that bacteria is the most sacred river to Hindus, worshipped as the goddess Ganga. Hundreds of millions of people live in its basin and depend on it for their daily needs. How does one river hold the salvation of the dead and the threat of disease at once? How did a Greek envoy describe it more than two thousand years ago? And why has the largest attempt ever made to clean a polluted river been called a failure? This is the story of a river that is at once a lifeline, a deity, and a problem no government has solved.

• 2. From Glacier To Delta

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  At Devprayag, in the Garhwal division of Uttarakhand, two mountain rivers meet to form the main stem of the Ganges. One is the Alaknanda, which hydrology counts as the true source because it is longer. The other is the Bhagirathi, which Hindu mythology treats as the source. The Bhagirathi rises at the foot of the Gangotri Glacier at Gomukh, at an elevation of 4,356 m.

  Six headstreams feed the highest reaches, and their five confluences, the Panch Prayag, are all sacred. In downstream order they are Vishnuprayag, Nandprayag, Karnaprayag, Rudraprayag, and Devprayag, where the Bhagirathi joins the Alaknanda. After roughly 256.90 km through a narrow Himalayan valley, the river emerges at Rishikesh and spills onto the Gangetic Plain at Haridwar.

  The Ganges then follows a 900 km arching course past Bijnor, Kannauj, Farukhabad, and Kanpur. Its largest tributary by discharge is the Ghaghara, also called the Karnali, which carries an average annual flow of about 2,991 m3/s from the Himalayas of Tibet through Nepal. The Yamuna, 1,444 km long, joins at the Triveni Sangam at Prayagraj and is actually larger there, contributing about 58.5% of the combined flow.

  At Farakka the river begins to split. Its first distributary, the Bhagirathi-Hooghly, branches off and runs past Kolkata to the Bay of Bengal near Sagar Island. The main branch crosses into Bangladesh as the Padma, takes in the Jamuna and then the Meghna, and forms the Ganges Delta, the world's largest delta at about 64,000 km2. Only the Amazon and Congo carry a greater average discharge than the combined flow of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Surma-Meghna system.

• 3. A River That Moves

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  Before the late 12th century, the Bhagirathi-Hooghly was the main channel of the Ganges, and the Padma was only a minor spill-channel. The river then reached the sea not by the modern Hooghly but by the Adi Ganga. Between the 12th and 16th centuries the two channels ran more or less equal.

  After the 16th century the Padma grew into the main channel. The Bhagirathi-Hooghly was choking with silt, and the river's main flow drifted southeast. By the end of the 18th century the Padma had become the principal distributary, which is how the Ganges came to join the Meghna and Brahmaputra before reaching the sea. The present confluence of the Ganges and Meghna is recent, formed only about 150 years ago.

  In 1787 a great flood struck the Teesta River, then a tributary of the Ganges-Padma. The flood forced a sudden avulsion. The Teesta shifted east to join the Brahmaputra, and the Brahmaputra cut a new channel south, now called the Jamuna. In ancient times the Brahmaputra had flowed more easterly, past Mymensingh to meet the Meghna. The old confluence site at Langalbandh is still considered sacred by Hindus, and a major early historic site, Wari-Bateshwar, lies nearby.

• 4. Goddess And Mother

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  Ganga is the consort of all three major male deities of Hinduism. As Brahma's partner she travels with him as water in his kamandalu, his water-pot. She is one of Vishnu's co-wives alongside Sarasvati and Lakshmi. Best known is her bond with Shiva, who is depicted as Gangadhara, the Bearer of the Ganga, with the goddess rising as a spout of water from his hair.

  The descent of the Ganges, the avatarana, runs through the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and several Puranas. The sage Kapila, disturbed in meditation by the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara, burns them to ashes with his gaze. Only the waters of the Ganges, then in heaven, can save them. King Bhagiratha undertakes rigorous penance and wins her descent, and Shiva catches her in his tangled hair so her force will not shatter the earth. In his honour the source stream is named Bhagirathi, meaning of Bhagiratha.

• 5. The Crossing Of The Dead

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  Ganga is the Triloka-patha-gamini, the one who travels the road of three worlds, flowing in heaven, earth, and the netherworld. Because of this she is a tirtha, a crossing point for the living and the dead alike. Her story is told at Shraddha ceremonies for the deceased, and her water is used in Vedic rituals after death.

  No place along her banks is more longed for at the moment of death than Varanasi, the Great Cremation Ground, or Mahashmshana. Those who die there are cremated on the banks and granted instant salvation. If death came elsewhere, immersing the ashes in the river can achieve the same. Mourners perform pinda pradana, offering balls of rice and sesame seed while reciting the names of the dead. By one account every sesame seed assures a relative a thousand years of heavenly salvation.

  The Skanda Purana tells of Vahika, an unrepentant sinner killed by a tiger and dispatched to hell. As vultures pick at his body, one drops a foot bone into the Ganges below. Blessed by that accident, Vahika is rescued by a celestial chariot and carried to heaven instead. The Mahabharata puts the belief plainly: if only one bone of a dead person touches the water of the Ganges, that person shall dwell honoured in heaven.

• 6. Capitals Along The Water

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  Pataliputra, modern Patna, was founded at the confluence of the Ganges and Son to control riverine commerce. During the Indus Valley Civilisation the Ganges was not the center of urban life. After the Saraswati River dried around 1900 BCE, populations migrated east toward the wetter Indo-Gangetic Plain, opening the Ganga Culture marked by Painted Grey Ware settlements.

  The Greek envoy Megasthenes, who lived around 350 to 290 BCE, was the first European to mention the river. In his work Indica he wrote that the Ganges at its source is 30 stadia broad and forms the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai, a nation he said possessed a vast force of the largest elephants. Centuries later the river was personified as the goddess Ganga, and cities like Varanasi and Haridwar grew as pilgrimage centers.

  In the eastern delta, the Pala Empire used the river for maritime trade with Southeast Asia between the 8th and 12th centuries. Under the Delhi Sultanate, control of the Doab, the fertile land between the Ganges and Yamuna, became the chief source of tax revenue. Gauda, on the banks of the river, rose as the capital of the Bengal Sultanate. The list of capitals on the river or its tributaries runs long, from Kannauj and Kashi to Dhaka, Munger, Delhi, and Kolkata.

• 7. Taming The River

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  Dams and canals were common on the Gangetic plain by the 4th century BCE. Kautilya, the advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, even listed the destruction of dams and levees as a war strategy. Firuz Shah Tughlaq built a 240 km canal on the Yamuna in 1356, now the Western Yamuna Canal. Shah Jahan built another in the early 17th century, later reopened as the Eastern Yamuna Canal under British control.

  The Ganges Canal, built between 1842 and 1854, was the first British canal in India with no Indian antecedent. Its eventual architect, Sir Proby Thomas Cautley, at first balked at cutting a canal through low-lying land toward a drier upland. The Agra famine of 1837 to 1838, on which the East India Company spent Rs. 2,300,000 in relief, made the project attractive to budget-conscious directors. Funding stalled under Lord Ellenborough and returned under Lord Hardinge in 1844.

  The finished canal ran 350 miles, with another 300 miles of branch lines, splitting below Aligarh and rejoining the Yamuna at Etawah and the Ganges at Kanpur. It required a capital outlay of 2.15 million pounds and was opened in 1854 by Lord Dalhousie. The historian Ian Stone called it the largest canal ever attempted in the world, five times longer than the main irrigation lines of Lombardy and Egypt combined.

  The Farakka Barrage opened on the 21st of April 1975, close to where the main flow enters Bangladesh. It feeds the Hooghly branch through a 26-mile feeder canal to keep the Kolkata port relatively silt-free, and its flow management became a long dispute with Bangladesh. The Indo-Bangladesh Ganges Water Treaty, signed in December 1996, set out that if flow at Farakka fell below 2,000 m3/s, each country would receive at least 1,000 m3/s for alternating ten-day periods. Within a year flow fell far below the historic average, and in March 1997 the Ganges in Bangladesh dropped to its lowest ever recorded, 180 m3/s.

• 8. A Sacred River In Crisis

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  Around 400 million people live close to the Ganges, and their sewage, industrial waste, and offerings wrapped in non-degradable plastic pour into it. The World Bank estimates the health costs of water pollution in India equal three percent of the country's GDP. It has been suggested that eighty percent of all illnesses in India, and one-third of deaths, can be traced to water-borne diseases.

  Varanasi, a city of one million, releases around 200 million liters of untreated human sewage into the river each day. Official standards say water safe for bathing should hold no more than 500 fecal coliforms per 100 ml. Upstream of the city's ghats the count already runs 120 times that, at 60,000. After Varanasi adds 32 streams of raw sewage, the concentration climbs to 1.5 million, with observed peaks of 100 million per 100 ml.

  The river's wildlife is paying too. The Ganges river dolphin, India's national aquatic animal, is one of only five true freshwater dolphins in the world. A 2012 World Wildlife Fund survey found only about 3,000 left across the Ganges and Brahmaputra catchments, a quarter of their numbers fifteen years earlier. The basin also holds the critically endangered Ganges shark and the gharial, and the upper plains once harbored wild elephants, rhinoceros, and Indian lions now driven out.

  Between 1985 and 2000, around Rs. 10 billion, roughly US$226 million, went into the Ganga Action Plan, called the largest single attempt to clean up a polluted river anywhere in the world. It has been described as a major failure, blamed on corruption, weak technical knowledge, poor environmental planning, and a lack of support from religious authorities. In December 2009 the World Bank agreed to loan India US$1 billion over five years to help save the river. Jawaharlal Nehru, who asked for a handful of his ashes to be cast into the Ganges, called her ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga, a line that still frames the fight to keep that water alive.