[Assam] [assam] A River Runs Through It

[bhuban.baruah]

New York Times (May 22, 2012)

European Pressphoto Agency
A man praying in the Ganges River in May 2004.
KOLKATA, India — India is embarking on an expensive last-ditch attempt 
to restore the heavily polluted Ganges River basin, home to 400 million 
people. The cleanup will take decades and cost tens of billions of 
dollars. The World Bank, which has already ponied up $1 billion in 
loans and grants, classifies it as “high” risk.

Despite the risk — the dangers posed by corruption, incompetence and 
political parochialism — the National Ganges River Basin Project is a 
great idea, one that could improve the health of millions of people 
while also boosting India’s economy.

The project is unprecedented in its complexity. Other dying rivers, 
including the Rhine and the Danube, have seen pricey turnarounds, but 
experts say they were child’s play compared with the challenge of 
restoring the Ganges.

The Ganges River runs through five separate states, each of them poor, 
each governed by a different political party, each rife with 
corruption. Most of the money for the Ganges cleanup will go to the 
authorities of those states, and of dozens of grimy towns, for the 
construction of sewage treatment plants and other infrastructure. The 
biggest and most populous of the Ganges states, Uttar Pradesh, has in 
recent years become a giant crime scene, as politicians and bureaucrats 
have looted hundreds of millions of dollars — some say billions — in 
health funds and food subsidies.

Even if corruption weren’t a factor, local administrators are the 
plan’s weakest link: most don’t have the skills to manage big projects. 
And there are far too few of them. India has only one-fifth of the 
civil servants per capita that the United States has.

Fixing the river will also require more efficient agricultural 
practices. One of the biggest factors in the Ganges’ decline is the 
volume of water diverted to irrigation: a whopping 90 percent. Getting 
farmers to switch to water-efficient crops and methods will be a major 
challenge.

Then there’s tradition. Millions of Hindu pilgrims will have to be 
persuaded to cease dumping idols, beads and corpses in the river. These 
practices account for five percent of the river’s pollution.

India tried reviving the river once before, and failed. The 1985 Ganges 
Action Plan cost $250 million over 20 years and succeeded in treating 
only 35 percent of the raw sewage then pouring into the river. 
Population growth has reversed many of those gains, as has poor 
maintenance of the infrastructure created during that effort.

One difference today is that the public seems to be on board. In a 
damning 2007 report on the shortcomings of the first Ganges cleanup, 
the environmentalist Rakesh Jaiswal lamented that “environmental 
concerns in India continue to be the burden of a few green crusaders.” 
But thanks to a recent spate of high-profile hunger strikes, the river 
is grabbing headlines and airtime.

The Indian government says it has learned from past mistakes in 
planning and execution. The World Bank claims transparency and audits 
can suppress corruption. The expertise of the country’s seven Indian 
Institutes of Technology has also been harnessed to the task.

So, is a Ganges cleanup worth the trouble? Absolutely. The price tag 
and the risks may be high, but the cost of doing nothing would prove 
even greater.

Across the Ganges basin, water-borne diseases cost families $4 billion 
a year. Delivering clean water to hundreds of millions of households 
could have an explosive effect on public health and productivity. 
Here’s one example: a single $43 million plan to connect the homes of 
300,000 mostly poor residents of Kanpur to a treatment plant built 
during the first cleanup would save $13 million in health expenses 
every year, according to the World Bank.

Cleaning up the Ganges isn’t just choosing to save the river over 
watching it expire. It’s choosing hope over cynicism, and the 
progressive India everyone wants over the corrupt and mediocre one 
citizens so frequently get.

Against the evidence, I’m betting on the good.


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