The sacred and the profane

Let the spiritual and the sustainable meet to save the Ganga

In the corridors of Indira Paryavaran Bhawan, the headquarters of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), any officer posted to the Ganga Project Directorate— also known as the National River Conservation Directorate (NRCD)—is either ‘low profile’ or ‘sidelined’.

This was not the perception when the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched by Rajiv Gandhi in 1985. He was fresh from an earthshaking electoral victory. His party had bagged 83 of the 85 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh alone. India’s young Prime Minister was hailed by sections of the media for his refreshing ‘approach’ to nature. Mountains and wildlife reserves were his mother’s pet obsessions, but to focus on a river was a novelty. A flurry of activities followed the announcement of the GAP, and the Central Ganga Authority (CGA) was formed to oversee its implementation, chaired by none other than the Prime Minister himself. A Ganga Project Directorate was set up under the aegis of the newly formed MoEF to implement the Action Plan. But then the euphoria around GAP waned as Rajiv Gandhi was sucked into the scandal surrounding the purchase of Bofors artillery guns, and his relations with the electorate entered the phase of disaffection.

Succeeding Prime Ministers did not give the Ganga its deserving pre-eminence either. However, the GAP and its administrative superstructure continued to function. Nomenclatures and acronyms were changed at regular intervals to convey ‘change’ and ‘dynamism’. 10 years after its formation, the CGA morphed into the more encompassing National River Conservation Authority that was mandated to look after Ganga’s tributaries as well. The National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) was the latest to enter the lexicon; and as a result, the NRCD turned into a routine division of the MoEF, demoralising even the officers who manned it. There was nothing in the GAP that could have really captured the imagination of an astute political executive either. The atrophy was painful.

Meanwhile, pollution in the Ganges was on the increase. Despite the presence of an array of effluent treatment plants along the banks of the Ganga, water pollution ballooned because of municipal waste dumped into the river. Many poorly designed treatment plants broke down, while power outages cramped the operations of the rest. Even today, a significant proportion of the 500 or so factories along the river discharge their effluents into the Ganga’s waters. The problem of toxic waste sludge in the Kanpur-Mirzapur belt continues to be a nightmare, and the bathing quality of water in Varanasi and Ahmedabad is below prescribed standards. Thanks to underestimation of effluent discharge and ineffective citizen’s committees, the condition the Ganga is in has inexorably moved from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’.

The problem with GAP is that it was improperly conceived and myopically focused. It suffers from three major failings. The first failing has been its narrow focus. For one of the world’s largest river basin systems, a grander agenda of corrective intervention was required; unfortunately, the GAP was envisioned as a narrow ‘clean-up programme’. Despite its wide geographical coverage, GAP focused on pollution control. Attention was on ‘water quality’, rather than what happened at the basin.

Firstly, the well-designed effluent treatment plants on the banks of the river were, at best, a naive civil engineer’s delight. They relied on ‘end of pipe’ effluent treatment plants (ETPs) that required a lot of electricity to function. Unfortunately, ETPs cannot be totally wished away. They are unavoidable in heavily polluted zones, where possibilities for waste minimisation at the source are limited. However, in some segments of the Ganges, there was scope for cheaper and more effective solutions that were energy efficient. But the gamut of agencies in charge of GAP were impermeable to simple alternatives, particularly those originating from technically sound and socially sensitive people living on the banks of the Ganges—people like the late Veer Bhadra Mishra from Varanasi, noted environmentalist and founding president of the Sankat Mochan Foundation, a non- governmental organisation devoted to cleaning and protecting the Ganges.

The second failing was that it had virtually nothing to do with hydraulics. In effect, this meant that the NRCD and the NGRBA had no jurisdiction to act on issues that went beyond the ‘clean-up paradigm’. Both entities failed to address the problem of uneven flow of the river in its various stretches. While the Ganga flows slowly in its western plains, it is menacingly kinetic in its eastern segment thanks to the narrowing course of the river. Patna and Kosi have been—and continue to be—vulnerable to floods. Water harnessing and diversion works allowed water to reach the parched zones of the basin, but it is not clear whether they left stream flows in the critical segments of the river unaffected.

Lastly, the third limitation of GAP was its failure to bring the agenda of sustainability closer to the ‘sacred’ dimension of the river.

For India’s chief political executive—whose worldview transcends the narrow ‘clean-up’ framework—the Ganga and its tributaries promise infinite possibilities for imaginative governance. The Ganga basin is a microcosm of India. It offers almost all the challenges that a Prime Minister faces in his job of governing the nation. Managing the Ganga river basin can also be a severe test of a Prime Minister’s political finesse. For its crucible value to be realised, the river needs to be seen for everything it has stood for—a hallowed water body, a spiritual entity, an invaluable heritage of India, a valuable slice of our incredible, ‘plural’ history, a drinking water source, a hydro-electric power base, an irrigation source and finally, a receptacle of municipal and industrial wastes.

A worldview that sees the Ganga in its totality can reconcile the conflicting perceptions about it. For long, the ‘sacred’ connotation about the river has been in conflict with the notion of its sustainability. Those who view the Ganga as sacred do not want to be told that it is a polluted water body, while those who treat the Ganga as a ‘receptacle’ do not want to emphasise its sacredness. Though Ganga heroes like Veer Bhadra Mishra strove hard to reconcile the two ideals, results were limited. Political engineering appears to be the only way out.

Another way in which the chief political executive could enhance the stature of the hallowed river is to use it as a symbol of peace across borders. There is a school of thought that argues that if the Indus water issue been resolved in the 1950s, our dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir would have been less acute. Why not re-imagine the Ganga as a positive symbol of India–Bangladesh relations?

The Modi government is widely expected to revamp the governance systems associated with river Ganga, its tributaries and other major peninsular rivers. There is talk of a larger formation that puts the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ganga restoration programme under the same umbrella. This could perhaps bring in the element of hydraulics into the programme. However, India’s river basins—notably that of the Ganga—are complex entities that require consolidation, resource mobilisation and activities to be undertaken on a war footing. The painfully staccato progress of last three decades leaves us with very few options. Ideally a well-designed National Ganga Action Programme should cover the dimensions of heritage, agriculture, industrial policy, pollution control, forests, water resources, trade and related ecosystems, foreign policy and inter- state affairs. In other words, a meso Government of India!

The new dispensation calls for the symbolic and substantive presence of the chief political executive at the local theatre of action. Viewed this way, the emergence of an apex leadership with strong moral suasion powers can be critical to effectively implementing a holistic national river restoration plan. In the specific context of the Ganga, this would mean that the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘sustainable’ complement the development programmes. The Prime Minister’s Office could be the charismatic rivet for the Ganga programme that provides enlightened direction at the local level for a transcending cause.

Ganga has been the most coveted river basin of the world. It is Ganga that ‘ran away from the paradise’—not Caño Cristales, as the world seem to believe.

Let us reclaim our prestige.

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