one watershed to another. There are dozens. They
now feed the Ganga.
At a place called Seondha, an enormous for-
tress crumbles beside a placid bend of the Sindh
River. The towering medieval gates bristle with
foot-long iron spikes: defense against ramming
by war elephants. A last descendant of the Bun-
dela Rajputs who built the stronghold still lives
in a rampart. Camped within its darkened walls
for a night, I never see him.
By the sluggish brown currents of the Betwa
River, I meet sand miners. They form a rag-
ged army of lean men scoop ing out the river-
bed with shovels and mechanical excavators.
The sand may be trucked to construction sites
as far as Lucknow and New Delhi, some 300
miles away. Many sand-mining operations are
illegal. Sand is a lucrative commodity in India.
It fuels a building boom, and a black market,
that is both preyed upon and protected by
goons, even as the plundering destroys aquatic
habitats and disrupts hydrology. (A UN study
calculates that humankind’s growing appe-
tite for humble construction sand—more than
40 billion tons a year—is double the volume of
sediments being replenished naturally by the
sum of the world’s rivers.) Sand-mining mafiosi
have killed law enforcement officers who’ve tried
to halt the gutting of India’s rivers. They’ve mur-
dered reporters who have exposed the forbidden
practice of excavating waterways.
“Keep walking,” snaps my latest walking part-
ner, river conservationist Siddharth Agarwal,
as the miners shout at us to stop.
We feign deafness. We lope down to the Bet-
wa’s banks, hail a passing fisherman, fling our
rucksacks into his dinghy, and paddle to the
opposite side. We walk into the dark—cranking
a 25-mile day to reach a village where bonfires,
drums, and chanting announce a Hindu fes-
tival. The astonished celebrants welcome us.
They prepare dal and roti. They lay out charpais,
woven beds, for sleeping. This reflexive hospi-
tality is universal along my path in rural India, a
land that’s hosted foot pilgrims since the Bronze
Age. Agarwal asks, gingerly, about sand mining.
The villagers shrug. “What can be done?”
Mafiosi, politicians, cronies—they control
life. True, the Betwa, stripped to its bedrock,
floods more erratically than before. And yes,
the unpredictable monsoons—climate change—
have made farming even more marginal. People
must dig thousands of small, rain-fed ponds to
water their puckered fields. But the govern-
ment is planning a dramatic rescue: diverting
an entire river, the Ken, into the Betwa’s channel
to replenish its shrunken flow.
“River linking,” Agarwal sighs. “False hopes.”
India has earmarked some $2 billion to imple-
ment a controversial interlinking-of-rivers
scheme: a massive water transfusion program
that proposes to graft 30 major Indian rivers
through more than 9,000 miles of concrete
canals to ease the water crisis. Braiding the Ken
to the Betwa will be the test case. Engineers plan
to siphon off the Ken’s “excess” monsoonal flows
and funnel them to the “drier” Betwa. Several
dams and barrages flooding 35 square miles of
land are needed for this engineering to work.
Environmentalists delivered a court battle.
“Where is all of this excess water?” Raghu
Chundawat, a leading Indian conservationist,
asks me sourly in nearby Panna National Park,
a sanctuary for endangered tigers. “The govern-
ment won’t share its flow data. I don’t think even
they know what the impacts will be.”
One known effect of turning the river gods into
plumbing pipes: Most of the land submerged by
the Ken-Betwa project lies within the tiger reserve.The Ganga: Holy river
I HIKE THE BANKS of Ma Ganga—Mother Ganges—
until her milewide currents arc north, cutting
like a shining steel blade across the yellowAuthor Paul Salopek
rows along a section of
the Ganges in Varanasi,
Hinduism’s holiest city.
Although the murky
water carries the ashesof some 30,000 people
whose bodies are
cremated there each
year, the faithful
believe it is pure
enough to drink.94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC