The Ganga’s Last Trickle

The Holy River is in its terminal phase as public apathy and gross ecological violations squeeze its future.

At Uttarkashi, a dry, desolate sand bed stretches for kilometers on end. It’s a disturbing sight, for there is no sign that it was once gushing with water from freshly molten snow and ice. On this very dry river bed begins our sad story of the Ganga’s last trickle. It’s with some sense of foreboding that one dares probe the possibility of its running dry. This is Hinduism’s Holy River, a river central to the rituals, mythology, life and afterlife of Sanatan Dharma, its water deemed eternally pure, its powers of benediction held in reverence, its origin drawn from the matted locks of Lord Shiva himself.

But if there’s a wake-up call to be served by the river, a real splash in the face, it’s what you encounter if you head for the glacial heights of the Himalayas, towards the Ganga’s point of origin. The Uttarkashi expanse is in Uttarakhand, enroute to Gangotri. It has mules being loaded with stones quarried from the dry bed, children and adults relieving themselves, and some parts on the periphery being reclaimed by farmers for cultivation. The water you see, by the side, is an almost invisible trickle. Trace it along its slow path, and you find untreated sewage joining the flow in at least ten points along a 5-km decline.

It’s with a heavy heart that one says it. The river Ganga as we know it, that gurgling flow of superlative sparkle and bounteous beauty, is a thing of the past. The immediate reason is a mad rush to dam the river. At places, the volume of flow has fallen from 40 cubic metres to just half a cubic metre per second. This is because as many as 20 dams are in different stages of commission on Bhagirathi and Alaknanda, tributaries that form the Ganga when they meet at Devprayag.

The damage done by these dams is obvious. “A dam takes water away from the natural flow of the river. This creates dry stretches as the water is tunnelled to meet the turbine. That in turn deprives locals of their access to water, damages upstream and downstream biodiversity, and thus totally disturbs the water recharge capability of the river. Thus a perennial, snow-fed Ganga is turning into a monsoon-fed river,” warns Himanshu Thakkar of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, an NGO that has worked extensively against damming of the Ganga.

Dam building not only restricts the river’s volume, it also creates choke points that turn the entire area vulnerable to landslides and other geological disasters. In the Outer Himalayan Hills near Haridwar, this is all the more worrisome. This is because these are loosely structured deposit mountains, made over millennia by stones piled up by river debris, not rock-solid fold mountains like the Greater Himalayas that arose from a powerful tectonic collision of plates an estimated 40-50 million years ago.

Take the meandering road to Gangotri, and you see other evidence of the slow suffocation of this once great river. Blasting and construction have given the Himalayas a shaken-up look. On the deep gorges, earthmovers—nicknamed ditch witches—slide precipitously on the edge, throwing massive boulders into the river.

At Gangotri, the scene is of total chaos. On an average, 2,000 pilgrims visit it every day. There are only about half-a-dozen bathrooms and all of them are dirty. For the 200-odd vehicles, there is no parking at all. They stretch for kilometres down the road. Traffic jams of up to an hour are routine. One wonders if the Uttarakhand authorities have any clue of the gaping infrastructure gap here. Add to this the fact that the road from Uttarkashi to Gangotri is a dirt track. There is almost no decent place with sewerage facilities for staying; what you have instead are matchbox-sized bed-and-breakfast hovels that discharge effluents straight into the once-pristine river. The state’s BJP government may owe allegiance to Hindutva, but taking care of the Ganga does not seem part of the ideological agenda.

Given the burgeoning pilgrims and lack of amenities, pollution is threatening the fragile ecosystem. Conditioned they may be to keep their emotions in check, but Gangotri pilgrims aren’t likely to put up with this for long.

It is at the pinpoint source of the river that you realise that this is not some distant environment problem. It is an issue of profound personal intensity. Our porter for the Gomukh trek is a 35-year-old Nepali, Dil Raj Joshi. He opens up with some reluctance. “Look, my livelihood depends on this trek,” he says, “but I won’t mind if you have a total ban on people going to Gomukh [the origin]. The last good snow was back in 1993. It is a hard trek because of the heat—something alien to us. I will find another job, but where will we find another river, another Ganga?”

It’s a sense of loss echoed downstream by a priest at the cremation ghat near Uttarkashi’s Kapileshwar temple. “The dams have taken away the water,” says the hereditary priest, “Only last week, there was almost none. When you perform the last rites of the dead, water is the crucial element needed to wash the body, to perform the prayers, and to make the offerings. We have never had this situation. Marriage or cremation rituals are almost impossible in spring time when rains are absent and the tunnels capture all the water.”

The real danger is that the Ganga may already have become irretrievable. This is because there are larger forces at work as well, a calamity wrought by the unseen—global warming. The mountains’ snow feed has been reducing, and if the planet’s climate actually does change (the debate is not conclusive yet) at anything like the drastic pace now predicted by such expert bodies as the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the Gangotri glacier is at grave threat of melting away forever.

Even if that calamitous eventuality is nearly a century away (a Chinese assessment projected a dry Ganga in 40 years but was of dubious scientific validity), any drastic decline in flow volume could prove disastrous long before that. The river could, for example, alter its flow and potentially lead to catastrophic ecological changes.

“The dry stretches are not symptoms, they are the new reality,” says Dr Harshvanti Bisht, reader at the department of economics at Government College, Uttarkashi, who has worked on the local environment of the Ganga, “As things stand, we may already have lost the battle to save the Ganga. Even as we have massive dams altering its course, the snow is drying up at the source, and yet the issue is nowhere near national consciousness. Only we from the state who suffer are striving—this must change.”

If precautionary planning is not done, there may be hell to pay. This is borne out by a new joint report put out by Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, the United Nations University and Care International. The indepth report indicates that the real impact will be on human migration, once the river becomes rain-fed instead of snow-fed. The resulting breakdown of ecosystem-based economies, subsistence herding, farming and fishing—all the way down to the Ganga Basin—will be the dominant driver of forced migration.

The main culprit in this mess is the Ministry of Environment and Forests. “[It] has simply abdicated its role in the protection of the Ganga. No objection certificates come almost automatically and the impact reports on environmental clearances are a bit of a joke,” complains Thakkar.

The Ministry is guilty of overlooking the long-term impact of interventions in the river’s natural flow. Dam building involves excavation, blasting and tower erection. The blasting methods are primitive and the chemicals used for construction harm water purity. Given the region’s fragility, none of this is sustainable. Add forest felling to the mess, and there’s little cause for hope.

Downstream in Rishikesh, meanwhile, river rafting is an adventure sport that has gripped the imagination of youngsters who come from all over India for the experience. For many months, though, the white water rapids disappear altogether. There’s just not enough water to grant these adventurers their thrills. “Rafting on the Alaknanda, especially professional rafting, may soon be a thing of the past. I believe that if all the new dams do indeed come up as planned, it will simply be pack up time for the river rafting industry. It is just about beginning to gain international recognition in India, and thus this is a sad state of affairs. It is going to impact at least 5,000 local jobs,” according to Ajeet Bajaj, president, Adventure Sports Association of India.

Sometimes, it takes a simple conversation to put a tragedy in perspective. My exchange is with Baba Naomi Nath, a wandering ascetic. Done up in the image of Lord Shiva, he looks dramatic, somebody straight out of a coffee table glossy. He has travelled all the way from Varanasi, and belongs to the Goraknath Akhada, a revered order of sadhus who have traversed the Ganga for centuries. “We are all guilty,” he says, in a measured tone that seems to summon cosmic gravitas, “It is your Karma as a tourist to keep this clean, mine not to lose myself in rituals alone but do something other than that to save the river. The government’s Karma is to have some sense of shame, for it is apathy that is killing the river, not lack of resources. The collision of our respective Karma is killing the Holy Ganga. ”

What’s convenient to some is inconvenient to others. But guilt, we must in truth all bear together. The fresh air of Gangotri behind me, I head back to Delhi without the calm the Himalayas ought to have bestowed upon me, but with a sense of disquiet. As night falls, I strain my ear for that beautiful sound of a river you can’t see but hear as it tumbles down the magnificent mountains. The river has gone eerily quiet.

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