Ganga river basin

Justice for Ganga Requires Urgent Collective Action

The last Sunday of September is observed as World Rivers Day.

It is not a coincidence that the Union government chose to rename the water resource ministry to the “Ministry of Jal Shakti” with divisions like the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, the Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation.

The departmental groupings and name modifications each have their own importance, purpose, results, and effects. In fact, the ministry’s mission has been clarified by the new name, which also specifies that its primary goal going forward will be to analyse the value and power of water and will thus be administratively distinct from river management.

Another significant distinction is that the government has preserved the department’s name as the Department of River Development rather than renaming it as the River Basin Development. Here, the obvious goal is to draw attention to the fact that the development and preservation of the river herself is important and is, administratively, an independent activity.

In India, where rivers are revered and treated as religious entities, such understanding cannot be subject to surprise.

Also read: India’s Water Governance Plan Cannot Leave Out Its People

The religious significance of rivers in India goes back centuries – Hindu priests have bathed in rivers like Ganga, Yamuna and Sarasvati and offered prayers along their banks. Given their religious significance, it is difficult to imagine that today these rivers are losing their famed purity. The fact has been highlighted multiple times by the Central Pollution Board.

In July 2023, the board reported that 46% of Indian rivers are polluted. It has identified 311 polluted river stretches (PRS) on 279 different rivers in 28 different states and 8 union territories. The board confirmed that Ganga is the most polluted river among all the others. In January 2023, dangerous amounts of faecal coliform were recorded by at least 71% of the Ganga’s monitoring stations.

Map outlining the states Ganga passes through. Photo: Wikimedia commons/Pfly, CC BY-SA 3.0,

The United Nations concurs, listing Ganga as one of the world’s most contaminated rivers. The saddest part is that this is the case even though the Union government has promised to “work hard” to purify the Ganga through the ‘Namami Gange’ project, and even though the Union has, since 2014, taken on 409 projects with a budget outlay of Rs 32,912.40 crore to clean up the river, as the Jal Shakti ministry confirmed in February 2023.

The reports released by different institutions confirm that reality does not reflect the “priority commitment” made to Ganga Mata (mother Ganga). Open drains allow untreated sewage and other sorts of garbage to flow into the Ganga, turning the river crimson in some places and producing clouds of deadly foam floating on the river’s surface in others. This happens in spite of all the ministry’s efforts and pledges.

Corruption, excessive bureaucracy, and the union government’s inability to utilise the entire sum allocated for development initiatives are frequently cited as the key causes of the project’s ineffective performance. The argument is well-known, but curiously, the two most recent cases that the National Green Tribunal heard add to the narrative and reveal that the nature of the problem is more complex than it appears.

Also read: Ganga Still Suffers – But Govt Thinks ‘Successful’ Rejuvenation Is a Blueprint for Other Rivers

In a case titled Subhas Datta vs. State of West Bengal & Others it was revealed that the hotels and restaurants close to Howrah Railway Station were polluting the river Ganga with their liquid and solid waste. These constructions were allegedly illegal, according to the complaint. In another case, Manoj Kumar Rai vs. State of Uttar Pradesh, the tribunal named local governments as being in charge of the Ganga’s pollution.

The tribunal declared that the state administration failed to hold negligent personnel accountable for the misappropriation of public funds and for failing to avoid harm to the Ganga river. The tribunal has taken seriously the discharge of about 20 million litres/day (MLD) of untreated sewage into the Ganga by various parties.

These two cases demonstrate that a project’s failure is also because of the negligence of the private sector combined with the state administration’s failure. The two cases. and several more like them, show that in a federal structure, it is inappropriate to label every failure as that of the Union government. Additionally, it is difficult to identify individuals, groups and communities who contaminated the Ganga because Ganga’s waters flow through so many different states. Indeed, there are several parties responsible for the contamination of the river, and each has to be held accountable. However, regrettably, in India, politics is the sole lens used to observe and assess issues.

While it is true that industrialisation is the primary cause of pollution, it is also true that religious and cultural ideals have not effectively promoted the concept and practice of revitalising the Ganga. Religious sentiments appreciate and support the Ganga as a living entity, but in reality, things work the other way around.

Religious rituals carried out on the banks of Ganga. Photo: Flickr/CC By 2.0

There should be no hesitation in admitting that other than industrialisation, one of the reasons for its contamination is related to its religious significance – immature and obscene ceremonies performed in the name of religion contribute to the issue.

The project’s goals have not been met because the river’s water quality is constantly harmed by the immersion of idols and other religious objects during various festivals. Devotees, while commemorating Ganga’s sacredness, rarely follow the guidelines outlined as part of the action plan for reviving Ganga. It is absolutely necessary in this situation to reinterpret ritualistic practices in order to encourage each Indian to see beyond themselves and safeguard the river from contamination.

Seeking to preserve the Ganga just because of her importance and utility is a widespread practice, however, it merely exemplifies human selfishness which compromise the identity of the river. This, unfortunately, further implies that Ganga should endure till it is beneficial to people. It is time that we went beyond self-serving motives and act collectively to save our rivers.

Dr. Deepti Acharya is working as senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara and author of the Book Water and Public Polices in India, Routledge, New York and London, 2021.

Under Modi, India Has Witnessed an Unprecedented Chomping of the Earth

When a government justifies environmental ‘sacrifice’ for ‘development’ purposes, it is not answering: whose development, at whose cost?

On October 28, in his ‘Mann ki Baat’ broadcast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Adivasis and their fight for rights. He said that India’s foremost freedom fighters were tribals, and recalled Adivasi heroes like Birsa Munda.

Touching. Anyone listening would be moved by the homage to India’s oldest communities. Until you hear how, three days later, he unveiled the Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat, for whose land acquisition and resource use, the livelihoods of 70 Adivasi nearby villages were compromised. They boycotted the ceremony and held a bandh.

To add to the irony, the statue is built on an island in the Narmada river, downstream of the Sardar Sarovar Project dam. Pushed by Modi first as chief minister and then as prime minister, the dam is responsible for the displacement and dispossession of several thousand more adivasis. As Narmada Bachao Andolan’s Medha Patkar asked in an open letter to Sardar Patel on the day of the unveiling, would the Sardar have condoned such injustice?

A month earlier, the United Nations conferred the Champion of the Earth Award on Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, citing their International Solar Alliance, and Modi’s push to eliminate single-use plastic. India’s recent enhancement of solar energy, and actions on some kinds of plastic, are indeed welcome. But what these hide is a much bigger pushback on environmental safeguards by the BJP government.

This builds on a trend the Congress had already set, in particular since the 1991 ‘reforms’ pushing India into the arms of the global economy. But the BJP’s forays into environmentally illiterate processes has been with greater single-mindedness than the Congress was able to muster. As noted by the Centre for Science and Environment in a quick analysis immediately after the UN award was announced, the last four years have seen:

Significant increase in allowing ‘development’ projects inside wildlife protected areas, bypassing necessary impact studies, from 260 in 2009-13 (under UPA) to 519 in 2014 – 18 (the BJP phase);
Proposed policy changes (e.g. a new Forest Policy, and Coastal Regulation Zone notification) that favour take-over of land, forest, water, coasts by corporate entities;
New projects that are mere greenwash, having no teeth or clarity, e.g. the National Clean Air Programme which has no specific targets for cities;
Attempts to weaken several crucial institutional structures, such as the National Green Tribunal (indications are that if BJP had its way, it would have shut the Tribunal down by now).

One can add more examples. One of the government’s brainchildren is the Sagarmala project. Much like the inland River Linking scheme (to which the Congress was also a party), this project too will be ecologically and socially disastrous, threatening coastal ecosystems and dispossessing fisher communities. Meanwhile, BJP’s favourite river, the Ganga, faces an even higher pollution load than it did in 2014, despite some 4,000 crores spent ostensibly for cleaning it up. And much of the celebrated solar push is from mega projects, by big corporations, with their own serious social and ecological costs, rather than decentralised energy production recommended by environmentalists and many energy experts.

Also read: Environment Ministry Mandates Health Assessment for Thermal Power Plant Clearance

In countries like India, the natural environment is the daily lifeline of the majority of its population: forest-dwellers, fishers, farmers, craftspersons, pastoralists, urban poor. So when a government justifies environmental ‘sacrifice’ for ‘development’ purposes, it is not answering: whose development, at whose cost? This is consistently ignored by politicians and economists sitting in Delhi. Oxfam’s latest report Reward Work Not Wealth shows that 1% of India’s population owns about 60% of its private wealth, and that in 2017 the wealth of India’s richest 1% increased by over Rs 20.9 lakh crore, equivalent to total central budget in 2017–18! Inequality is steadily growing; such ‘development’ has fattened the rich, at the cost of the poor.

At the same time, the three-decade old phenomenon of ‘jobless growth’ has intensified, according to Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2018. Much of the wealth generated by rapid growth, has simply bypassed over 90% of its workforce stuck in the informal economy. The BJP has made it worse; demonetisation has led to the loss of 3.5 million jobs, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Meanwhile crony capitalism continues, with the government bending over backward to excuse the enormous debt that corporations (including Adani, Tata, Essar) owe to public sector banks; and new scams like crop insurance (favouring Reliance) coming to light.

It is therefore no surprise that large sections of the dispossessed are in agitation mode. The last year has seen several mass protests against anti-poor policies: 30,000 farmers marching into Mumbai in March; 1.5 lakh farmers and workers in a Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh rally to Delhi in September; thousands more joining rallies under the auspices of Ekta Parishad and Samvidhan Samman Yatra of National Alliance of People’s Movements; and one lakh participants of a pan-Indian coalition of farmer movements are expected to demonstrate in Delhi in end-November.

Dalit movements have upped the protest against horrendous attacks on them in the name of the cow, as they find themselves still at the bottom rungs of a religion-ordained hierarchy. In Karnataka and elsewhere, craftspersons have held satyagrahas, protesting the imposition of GST on already fragile livelihoods. Though Modi was able to push through the Statue of Unity, his even more wasteful project, the Bullet Train (estimated to cost as much as the total 2017 Railways Ministry outlay), is facing opposition from over 1,000 farmers who have gone to court against the acquisition of their land.

If this mass discontent is not resulting in rebellions to overthrow a blatantly pro-rich and anti-poor state, it is because we are not yet seeing common cause. And we have all been seduced by a superficial model of democracy, believing that it’s all about voting the ‘right’ party into power, rather than exercising power in our own local communities and collectives.

But even the partial democracy we have is currently under threat. Organisations like INSAF, Hazards Centre, Greenpeace India, Amnesty, and several individual activists, advocates, academics have been targeted because they ask uncomfortable questions. New terms like ‘urban Naxals’ get coined to give legitimacy to this witch-hunt.

Alos read: Gadkari Not on the Side of the Angels Where Ganga Is Concerned: Jairam Ramesh

In May the University Grants Commission told universities that academics in public funded institutions are subject to rules applying to government servants, which means they cannot criticise state policy. The Centre has written to all states to track NGOs that indulge in ‘anti-national’ (a euphemism for any form of dissenting) activities. Virtually all spaces where civil society could participate in the state, such as expert committees or planning bodies, have been shut off, or filled with ‘yes-men’ (yes, mostly men) who won’t dissent. And Prime Minster Narendra Modi has perfected the art of encouraging all this by keeping silent, including on some of the most horrendous crimes against women, Dalits and Muslims.

The above is not an argument in favour of other major opposition parties. When it comes to blind faith in economic growth, ignoring environmental and human rights concerns, there is not so much to distinguish them from each other. But the toxic combination of ecologically illiterate decisions, authoritarian and anti-democratic steps, and communal politics that the BJP has displayed in the last four years, may be unprecedented.

If the BJP comes back to power in 2019 and does not change its spots, we are in for a period that may surpass the harrowing couple of years of the Emergency in the 1970s, pushing India into dangerous waves of internal conflict, division and suffering. People’s movements and all those who care for fundamental democratic freedoms, peace, and a healthy environment – including youth, particularly the youth – need to gather forces to safeguard the fundamental values our constitution is premised on.

Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh, Pune.

Gadkari Not on the Side of the Angels Where Ganga Is Concerned: Jairam Ramesh

An interview with the former Union environment minister about G.D. Agarwal, hydropower projects, sand-mining and the ‘Clean Ganga’ mission.

On October 11, after fasting for nearly four months, G.D. Agarwal passed away in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand. Agarwal, also known as Swami Gyanswarup Sanand, had been on a ‘fast unto death’ since June 22. Among other things, he was demanding better stewardship of the Ganga and to make it ‘aviral’ (free-flowing).

This wasn’t Agarwal’s first such fast. Nidhi Jamwal caught up with Jairam Ramesh, the former Union environment minister, on behalf of The Wire for an interview about Agarwal, hydropower projects, sand-mining and the ‘Clean Ganga’ mission. Ramesh had met Agarwal in Haridwar in early 2010, convincing him to break his fast then.

The conversation offers a retrospective view of attempts India has made to revive the Ganga. These issues will also be discussed at the India Rivers Week 2018, a unique meeting on rivers in India. It is being held at the WWF, New Delhi, from November 24 to 26, 2018. The focus of this year’s three-day meet is ‘Can India Rejuvenate Ganga?’.

The interview has been presented in full, lightly edited for clarity. The questions are in bold and the editor’s comments, in square brackets.

You seem to have had both personal and professional interactions with G.D. Agarwal…

G.D. Agarwal and my father were contemporaries. My father was a professor of civil engineering at IIT Bombay and Agarwal was a professor of civil engineering at IIT Kanpur. So they were both part of the IIT system. I had heard of Agarwal, but had never met him.

My first meeting with him in February 2010 was rather dramatic, when Agarwal went on a fast and I was the environment minister. I went to Haridwar to meet him. When I met him, he embraced me, remembered my father and said they were friends. That was my first physical contact with Agarwal. I spent the whole morning, five to six hours with him, and asked him his demands.

What were the demands?

He demanded that Gomukh to Uttarkashi – 130 km – be declared an eco-sensitive zone. He demanded protection of the river Ganga and putting a stop to the hydel projects on the Bhagirathi: the Loharinag Pala, Bharon Ghati and Pala Maneri projects. I told him I will convey his demands to the Indian government. I came back and wrote a note, which is also there in my book, Green Signals: Ecology Growth and Democracy in India. I informed the government that Agarwal’s demands were eminently reasonable, which I support.

Two of the projects [Bharon Ghati and Pala Maneri] had not started. The only demand on which I had some reservation was the Loharinag Pala hydro power project, because 40% of the work was already complete, and about Rs 1,000 crore had been spent by the NTPC [National Thermal Power Corporation]. But this is a project that shouldn’t have started at the first place. I don’t know how an environmental clearance was granted to it. The fact of the matter is projects were being indiscriminately approved on the Alaknanda, Mandakini and Bhagirathi rivers, and without a cumulative assessment. We were only doing individual assessment of the hydro projects.

So what was the government’s response after you approached it with Agarwal’s demands?

I spoke with the then prime minister [Manmohan Singh] and he said I should talk to Pranab Mukherjee [the then finance minister] and Sushilkumar Shinde, who was then the power minister. Time was running out because Agarwal was on a ‘fast unto death’. We had a discussion and I said that if I can get a commitment that the Indian government will compensate the NTPC, then it should be okay. The then PM, Mr Mukherjee and Mr Shinde saw my point of view. I was asked to go back and tell Agarwal that the government will meet his demands and he should give up the fast. So I went back to Haridwar and Agarwal drank some juice and broke his fast.

My last meeting with Agarwal was in April 2016 in New Delhi, when Nitish Kumar had organised an interaction on ‘aviral’ Ganga at the IIC [India International Centre]. This was the extent of my interaction with Agarwal.

Also read: Almost Rs 4,000 Crore Spent, but the Ganga Is More Polluted Under Modi’s Watch

Agarwal also used to stress on the river-basin approach. Did he discuss that with you?

Yes, apart from declaring Gomukh to Uttarkashi as an eco-sensitive zone and the abandonment of three hydro projects, Agarwal had a third, equally important demand – of a comprehensive assessment of the Ganga river basin. So I set up a consortium of the seven IITs under the leadership of IIT Kanpur to prepare, for the first time, a comprehensive Ganga river basin management plan. Such a plan should actually have been done 20 years ago. The IITs consortium produced a 30-35-volume report and submitted it to the Indian government. But nothing has come out of it. The same report had [described] a draft law for protecting the Ganga, which I am told is now under consideration.

There have been news reports [such as this] quoting Nitin Gadkari, the Union minister for water resources, that the Centre will bring an Act to protect the Ganga in the Parliament’s next session.

Mr Gadkari is not on the side of the angels as far as the Ganga is concerned. Mr Gadkari, [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi, all of them believe in the nirmal [clean] Ganga part. They don’t realise that without aviral Ganga, you cannot have nirmal Ganga. The present Indian government has bifurcated aviral Ganga and nirmal Ganga. In fact, Namami Gange is largely a ‘nirmal’ Ganga plan, whereas the Mission Clean Ganga that I had announced in 2010 as an environment minister… I had clearly said there are two components to it: nirmal Ganga and aviral Ganga. How can you clean Ganga if there is no water in the river?

So, I am not sure if Mr Gadkari understands this, and even if he does, he is very commercial in his outlook, like with plans for dredging, waterways, etc. The Indian government is laying a lot of stress on the nirmal part of the Ganga, which is a continuation of what we had started. But on aviral Ganga, I have not seen any movement whatsoever in the last four years. In fact, the Centre wants to reopen many of the hydel projects that have been closed.

But India is not an energy-sufficient country, and hydro is seen as clean energy.

Hydro accounts for 17% of our electricity generated. We are committed that by 2030, 40% of our electricity will come from non-fossil fuel sources, which means hydel, nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Fortunately, nuclear is not taking off and accounts for only 3.5% of our electricity generation. It will go maximum up to 5%. The hydel contribution will probably be in the range of 20-22%, which means doubling our hydel capacity.

The notion that hydel is clean isn’t true. It is clean in some ways, but hydel is also environmentally devastating in many ways. It submerges land, displaces people, destroys forest and wildlife. It can induce seismicity, like what happened in Koyna. It is a difficult choice to make. And we are a democratic system. We can’t do what the Chinese did in the Three Gorges dam. They went ahead with the project and ‘resettled’ a million or two million people. No one knows where those people are now. We are still doing resettlement and rehabilitation in the Narmada project, which has some very different viewpoints. So, we cannot close our eyes blindly and say we will promote hydel. The promotion of hydel projects also has environmental consequences, which we have to be very sensitive to.

G.D. Agrawal. Credit: gangatapasya.in

A lot of hill states complain that if they are not allowed to come up with hydel projects, they will lose out on a source of income.

So give them a green bonus. I wrote my solution to the then PM [Singh] that if we cancel a hydel project on environmental grounds, we should compensate the state with a green bonus. I don’t see any reason why states like Uttarakhand cannot be compensated. Say Rs 300 crore a year for five years. There are ways of compensating.

Agarwal had also protested sand-mining in the Ganga and demanded a ban on it.

Ban on sand-mining is a tricky issue. According to law, it is a minor mineral and a responsibility of the state government. As an environment minister, I had written a large number of letters to the then chief minister of Uttarakhand, Ramesh Pokhriyal, and had met him twice in Delhi and twice in Dehradoon. But [sand mining in the Ganga] was happening with political patronage.

I wrote a letter to Pokhriyal that is in the public domain, where I said if push comes to shove, I will use section 5 of the EPA [Environment (Protection) Act] to issue directions. But I didn’t use it as then it would have created an unnecessary problem between the Centre and the state government, and people would have said I am targeting a [Bharatiya Janata Party] government in Uttarakhand. I kept talking to Pokhriyal, but it was clear there was political patronage [for sand mining] at the highest level.

Do you think the successive governments have failed Agarwal and the Ganga river?

It’s not for me to say, but I went to Haridwar twice in the space of four days to meet Agarwal. It is very rare that ministers go. My first visit, the then PM didn’t know of. I went on my own. But my second visit had the full backing of the Indian government, where I carried a letter sent by Mr Mukherjee [the finance minister] to Agarwal asking him to break the fast.

I remember one meeting of the National Ganga River Basin Authority. The Ganga was declared a national river in February 2009. And the National Ganga River Basin Authority was set up. The chief ministers of the five main Ganga basin states were a part of the authority. I became environment minister in May 2009 and then we had the first meeting of the authority. Mr Nitish Kumar suggested that the Gangetic dolphin should be given national status. If there were more dolphins, it would mean that the Ganga had both water and clean water. In less than 48 hours, the Centre notified and gazetted the Gangetic dolphin as India’s national aquatic mammal. This is something Mr Nitish Kumar still remembers.

Also read: Climate Change Threatens Dolphin Habitats in Ganga

In 1985, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had announced a national programme to clean the Ganga. You set up the river authority as well. It has been over three decades and the river remains polluted.

It isn’t true to say that nothing has happened. Two things on this. Firstly, I got the Ganga water quality tests done by the CPCB [Central Pollution Control Board]. There were three indices of river quality: BOD [biological oxygen demand], DO [dissolved oxygen] and faecal coliform. On the first two indicators, there is evidence to show that there has been an improvement. But on the third indicator, unfortunately we have not done well, and it is easy to see why: because the bulk of sewage led into the Ganga is untreated. In fact, 75% of the pollution load in the Ganga is because of untreated municipal sewage. Only 25% comes from industrial effluents.

Secondly, the main Ganga river is 2,500 km long. But it is not true to say that the entire length is highly polluted. The worst stretch is the 750 km from Kannauj to Varanasi because this is where municipal sewage gets mixed with industrial effluents from sugar mills, paper mills, distilleries, tanneries, agricultural runoff, etc., and flows into the Ganga. Had Mr [Rajiv Gandhi] not launched GAP-1 [Ganga Action Plan 1] – and then there was GAP-2 – the pollution load in the Ganga would have been worse.

Then there is the Namami Gange project, which has Rs 20,000 crore funds already allocated for rejuvenating the river.

Namami Gange is basically taking the ‘Clean Ganga’ mission forward. It has proposed sewage treatment plants in 160 towns and cities along the 2,500-km-long river, covering Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar. A lot of projects had already been sanctioned between 2009 and 2011. The present government has sanctioned more projects. That’s all. Namami Gange is actually Mission Clean Ganga translated into Sanskrit.

So at present, are those projects being proposed and implemented on the Ganga following the cumulative assessment approach?

No. The Wildlife Institute of India has warned that many of the national waterways will endanger the dolphin. Secondly, if there is going to be a revival of hydel projects [on tributaries of the Ganga] – and the Indian government, I think, has gone to the Supreme Court of India and filed some affidavits – then there will be no water left in the river. No aviralta. Aviralta is no longer an issue. No one is talking of aviral Ganga.

Nidhi Jamwal is an independent journalist based in Mumbai.