People in the Ganges
Basin use stairways
such as the Chandi
Ghat in Haridwar to
reach the river for a
dip in what they see as
purifying waters.
Hindu belief in the
river’s cleansing
powers draws millions
of pilgrims to the
river every year,
including during the
COVID-19 pandemic.
OPPOSITE
Swami Shivanand
Saraswati, 75, bathes
in the Ganges at his
Matri Sadan ashram
in Haridwar. He leads
a long-running and
ambitious campaign to
protect the river from
mining, new dams, and
pollution. Plastic waste
is just one of many
pollutants to befoul it.One large municipal dump the team visited—
unofficial, but used by city trucks—was so close
to the riverbank that the Ganges devoured a
portion of it during each monsoon.
“As soon as you’d get to a town or anything
smaller, there was no waste management at
all ... It was like they fell off a cliff,” Koldewey told
me on the river one morning, as she collected
water samples from an inflatable boat. “The fact
is, the biggest waste management infrastructure
is the river itself. People would put their waste
along dry river channels in recognition that it
would all be taken away.
“That’s not an easy thing to fix. If you are
replacing the river with a waste management
system that is equivalent, that becomes quite
significant in terms of cost.”has a more or less functioning system of trash
collection and disposal.
Trash collection in India’s cities is often
inefficient, and collection rates are low. The
situation is more disheartening in rural areas,
where about two-thirds of Indians live. In the
state of Bihar, which has a population of 129
million, roughly the size of Japan’s, plastic
waste gets burned or dumped in ad hoc sites,
where foraging cows and other animals inad-
vertently consume it. Or it’s deposited on a
sandbar for Ganga to carry away.
Heather Koldewey, a marine and freshwater
scientist at the Zoological Society of London
and co-leader of the expedition, says she came
to understand the river’s flushing power in a
new light as she traveled the length of the river.
100 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC