“We need those people who are 6,000 miles
away to come to the table and be open to
change,” she told me.
Like climate change, plastic waste is a side
effect of our hydrocarbon habit—most plastics
are made from oil and gas—and its impacts, as
well as the solutions to the problem, are both
local and global. At least some of the litter I
watched Jambeck record in Patna eventually
would make its way into an open curb drain.
From there a large pipe emptied it directly
into the river, setting it on a course for the Bay
of Bengal.
T
HE GANGES RIVER IS
one of the world’s
largest, worshipped
by a billion Hindus as
Mother Ganga, a living
goddess with power to
cleanse the soul. The
headwaters emerge from the Gangotri Glacier
high in the western Himalaya, just a few miles
from Tibet, and then drop down steep mountain
canyons to India’s fertile northern plain. There
the river meanders east across the subcontinent
into Bangladesh, broadening as it absorbs 10
large tributaries. Just after it merges with the
Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay
of Bengal. It’s the world’s third largest fresh-
water outlet to the ocean, after the Amazon and
the Congo. It supports more than a quarter of
India’s 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal, and part
of Bangladesh.
So sacred is the river that its water, Ganga
jal, has been hauled home in jugs by con-
quering armies and guidebook-toting tourists.
Seventeenth- century traders believed it stayed
“fresher” on long sailing voyages than water
drawn elsewhere. Sir Edmund Hillary, who con-
quered Everest, was a fan. You can buy it today
in blue bottles from Walmart.
Sadly, the Ganges also has long been one of the
world’s most polluted rivers, befouled by poison-
ous effluents from hundreds of factories, some
dating to the British colonial period. The facto-
ries add arsenic, chromium, mercury, and other
metals to the hundreds of millions of gallons of
raw sewage that still flow in daily. Plastic waste
is only the most recent insult.
Yet even in the face of it, and of sometimes
lethal counts of fecal bacteria, belief in the
mythic purity of the Ganges endures—and it
complicates long-running efforts to clean up the
river. Sudipta Sen, who grew up in Kol kata and
teaches South Asian history at the University
of California, Davis, spent 14 years writing his
book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River.
He found the paradox of the modern river, so
worshipped and yet so neglected, frustrating
to write about.
“The river is really two rivers,” Sen said.
“There is this belief that the river can clean
itself and has magical properties. If the river
can clean itself, then why should we have to
worry about it? I have seen this. I have heard
many people say the river cannot be polluted;
it can go on forever.”
The Ganges reinforces that story line during
the summer monsoon, when it is said to be “in
swell.” At Patna, where the river is joined by sev-
eral large tributaries, widening considerably, the
monsoon converts it into a raging torrent that
regularly floods Bihar, the mostly rural state of
which Patna is the capital.
Early one morning, with members of the
National Geographic expedition, I crossed from
Patna to the Ganges’s north side and drove to
a small village fringed with banana palms and
populated by farmers and fishermen, who eke
out a living catching carp. Frayed blue-nylon
fishing nets lay in piles near a group of brick
houses and thatched-roof shanties. Abandoned
fishing nets are a significant source of plastic
pollution in the Ganges, one that endangers river
dolphins, turtles, and otters.
A large earthen berm stood between the river
and the homes, but during the recent monsoon
season, it hadn’t been enough to protect them.
Some of the locals had only recently returned
after evacuating during the flood. Chip bags and
other litter were scattered about. Not a trash bin
was in sight.
The fisherman I had come to see was asleep,
so I climbed over the berm, still covered with
sandbags, and sat on the ghat—the steps down
to the river—watching people go about their
morning chores. Five women crouched on the
bottom step and washed clothes in the murky
water. Several men arrived to bathe. Each
emptied shampoo from a plastic sachet before
discarding it in the river. When the men had
finished, they offered water back to Ganga in
cupped, uplifted hands.96 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC