Ganga

©  2009  Rose George

Good news from India, where the Ganga, or Ganges, has been declared a National River (presumably it wasn’t one before), and a National Ganga River Basin Authority has declared a Mission Clean Ganga campaign. It is seriously, critically needed. The Yamuna, another great river, that descends into Delhi from the Himalayas, is in places dead. The Ganges is held of course to be a river of purification but if you bathed in it you would probably get the added bonus of the purification brought by cholera or giardia: The towns along the Ganges produce 3000 million litres of sewage daily, but there is the capacity to treat only a third of that. I highly recommend Faecal Attraction, a lovely documentary about the Yamuna and Ganges by Pradip Saha, produced under the auspices of the excellent Indian environmental group Centre for Science and the Environment. To be watched particularly for the professor who makes a habit of counting the fecal coliform content of his beloved holy river, and still goes and bathes in it. Science versus heart. There is a short clip here, and it can be bought from CSE here.