Hello Prof and friends! Today, I would like to share more about one of the worlds most polluted rivers – The Ganges River. To be honest, I did not really expect the dire situation of the Ganges River – prior to doing this research. Hence, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight the plight of the river. 

In 2014, Narendra Modi’s election campaign made cleaning the Ganges River a top nation priority (Clean Ganga, 2014). In 2017, a high court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand handed down a verdict on the Ganges River declaring it a “living entity”, thus acquiring the status of a legal person. Polluting the river is equivalent to harming a human being (Sandhu,2017). However, these restrictions and promises fell short, causing more problems for the riparian communities. 

Public Health Crisis 

The Ganges River provides a water source for an estimated 400 million people; the river is home to industrial waste, sewage and even human remains. However, attempts at mitigating this health risk are often neutralized by Hinduism beliefs about the holiness of the water (Natalie, 2017). 

Water-borne diseases are often transmitted to the human population by direct bathing in dirty water or by drinking. Faecal matters in water cause risks such as typhoid, cholera and hepatitis. In 2015, there were an estimated 1.3 billion people identified at risk for cholera, with India being among the countries with the highest number of people at risk (Natalie, 2017). 

Current measures 

These problems are due to faecal pollution in Ganga. According to the available data, faecal pollution is one of the key water quality problems all along the river, which is aggravated during the monsoon, whereby open defecation and uncontrolled faecal sludge disposal on land which is washed out to the river during periods of rain. To combat this problem, India’s Toilet-Building Revolution aims at building more than 110 million toilets to provide to more than 600 million people in 60 months. However, the cleaning of the river requires just more than this (Helen, 2019). Traditional asset management and insurance approaches must be reformed to ensure that individuals help maintain the sanctity and health of rivers as natural assets (Sandhu,2017). And it is important to align riparian communities’ efforts across the different provinces to ensure that the Ganges River will not suffer. 

 

 

References 

Clean Ganga. (2014). MyGov Blogs. Retrieved from: https://blog.mygov.in/clean-ganga/ 

Helen. R (2019). Half of India couldn’t access a toilet 5 years ago. Modi built 110M latrines — but will people use them? Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/05/asia/india-modi-open-defecation-free-intl-hnk-scli/index.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20world%20is%20amazed%20that,independence%20icon%20Mahatma%20Gandhi’s%20bir 

Natalie P. (2017). Cleaning up a public health threat—The River Ganges. BMC Series Blog. Retrieved from: https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcseriesblog/2017/07/17/cleaning-up-a-public-health-threat-the-river-ganges/ 

Sandhu, S. C. (2017). Revive our rivers, save our cities. CNN. Retrieved from https://blogs.adb.org/blog/revive-our-rivers-save-our-cities