National Geographic - USA (2020-08)

Kolkata

(Calcutta)

Dhuburi

March 6, 2019

Looksan

Gauripur

Varanasi

Tis

ta

Ganges

Ganges (Ganga)

Br

ah

ma

put

ra

So

n

Bay of

Bengal

A Y A

(^) P l a i n
Ganges
Delta

BHUTAN

BANGLADESH

C HINA

MYANMAR

(BURMA)

NAGALAND

SIKKIM

JHARKHAND

ARUNACHAL

PRADESH

MEGHALAYA

MANIPUR

TRIPURA

MIZORAM

WEST

BENGAL

BIHAR

ASSAM

Leaves India

July 29, 2019

They are simply Punjabi farmers at work.

And then, dimly, I understand. We have found

the Indus already! For days—weeks—we have

been walking within the diffused presence of

the river. Its currents have been diverted, bled

off, channeled, diffused, parsed into countless

canals, pipes, weirs, and furrows. This human-

built capillary system has rendered the ancient

green channels of the Indus tributaries largely

irrelevant as geographical entities. Each of Pun-

jab’s billions of ripe wheat heads carries a drop of

the Indus watershed in atomized form.

India was an early warrior in the green revolu-

tion. High-yield seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,

tractors, and motorized well pumps have hugely

increased crop yields since the 1960s. Once the

poster child for famines, India feeds itself today.

Its farmers sell the world torrents of grains and

fruits. But this stunning victory against hunger

has come at a steep cost. Agricultural chemi-

cals pollute the tributaries of the Indus, possi-

bly contributing to hot spots of diseases such as

cancer. And the bill has come due for decades of

unsustainable harvests: a staggering loss of finite

quantities of groundwater. Farming is chancy in

of the Earth—a nurturer of ancient civilizations,

a binational lifeline for millions of farmers in

India and Pakistan? As I walk across the Indian

state of Punjab, finding it is no simple task.

I join Arati Kumar-Rao, an environmental

photographer, slogging the back roads south

of Amritsar. Five large tributaries of the Indus

ribbon across northwestern India. The Jhelum.

The Chenab. The Ravi. The Beas. The Sutlej. We

seek out the Beas. Soon we are lost. We blunder

into a labyrinth of industrial agriculture.

Each day is a furnace. We sweat around end-

less, steaming quadrangles of wheat. We pass

Sikh temples topped with airy white domes,

where volunteers offer simple meals of dal and

rice to all passersby. We dodge armadas of chug-

ging tractors. Each blasts Punjabi pop music at

the sky through loudspeakers lashed to the oper-

ator’s chair. Why? It’s impossible to say. Can the

drivers hear the music over their roaring engines?

Aliens flying above Punjab would look down in

wonder—with fingers plugging their ears. Cults

of deaf humans (they would think) are perform-

ing some tireless ritual: etching the land in circles

with machines, serenading the cosmos. But no:

CROWDED AND VULNERABLE

More than 400 million people live in the Ganges Plain,

where large rivers such as the Ganges, Yamuna,

and Ghaghara are fed by Himalayan tributaries.

Seasonal variations in snow and glacial meltwater,

along with unpredictable monsoons, make the

region dangerously prone to flooding and droughts.