Title: Fwd: [riverlink] Floating corpses as India
shines
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Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 05:40:09 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [riverlink] Floating corpses as India shines
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Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 11:16 AM
Subject: Floating corpses as India
shines
Floating corpses as India
shines
Fishing out 60 floating corpses on the eve
of Sattu Amavasya, a bathing festival that fell on April 19,
from the 10-kilometres long stretch of river Ganga at Kanpur, the
volunteers of Eco-Friends demonstrated the apathy with which the
sacred river continues to be treated. As the British Sky One Channel
crew captured the event on camera, the progress of cleaning the river
under the ambitious Ganga Action Plan became too evident.
�Be under no illusion that it happens on
auspicious occasions only,�� cautions Rakesh Jaiswal, Executive
Secretary of Eco-Friends. Since this civil society organization
started its campaign to
clean the Ganga in 1997, it has extracted
some 1000 human corpses from the short stretch of the river in Kanpur
alone. Extrapolate this data over the years and across the length of
the river,
the picture that emerges is gruesome and
tragic.
Volunteers ferrying corpses to their
final resting place
Along with an estimated daily
load of 1.5 billion litres of untreated sewage, the Ganga ferries
thousands of half-burnt corpses that are put into the river for
spiritual rebirth. The result is deeply ironic; the ancient symbol of
purity has become a great open sewer along much of its length. When
the 15th century poet Kabir wrote of the Ganga, ``hell flows along
that river, with rotten men and beasts�, few would have believed
that his impious lament would one day be true.
�The harsh truth is,�
laments Jaiswal, �that though the campaign has succeeded in
garnering the vital support of local communities who live along the
river the concerned government agencies have looked the other way.�
But under this growing apathy and the pressures of burgeoning
population, the Ganga�s incredible cleansing capacity seems to be
giving up. Today, in the basin of a half-billion souls purification
and pollution swim together in unholy wedlock.
While inability to afford the cremation
expenses accounts for one-third of the floating corpses, another
one-third is entirely due to the strong belief that immersing the dead
brings moksha or salvation. Ironically, the remaining one-third
is composed of those unclaimed bodies that the police conveniently
dump into the river. It is an unbelievable commentary on the manner in
which the dead humans and the living river gets treated.
As the river moves
center-stage in the proposed interlinking of rivers, a la
Ganga-Cauvery link, the transferred waters to the south will have to
ferry the pollutants of the dreadful kind as well. As the unsuspecting
masses in the peninsular south are made to believe the virtues of
linking the rivers, the likes of Jayalalitha and Rajnikant only need
to walk along a stretch of the Ganga on any given day to reconfirm
their unstinted faith in $ 120 billion interlinking of rivers
proposal.
�Reassurance that the river
will be cleansed of its incredible pollutant load before the proposed
interlinking gets underway must be taken with a pinch of salt,��
cautions Jaiswal. If the million-dollar Ganga Action Plan could not
clean the river a bit in the past two decades, what guarantee such
assurances stand in the wake of the unprecedented failure of the Plan?
Conversely, the river is more polluted now as compared to the time
when the project was launched two-decades ago.
Even the flesh-eating turtles
released in the Ganga to munch the dead bodies have failed to make any
significant impact. Released into a stretch of river at Varanasi in
the late 1980s, poaching may have accounted for a better part of their
promised appetite. Far from replicating the bio-control measure in
other areas, the project seems to have fallen flat owing to increase
in pollutant concentration vis-�-vis reduced flow in the
river.
Myth has it that goddess
Ganga descended to earth in the form of a river, to fuel life into
60,000 sons of the ancient ruler King Sagara, who had been burned to
ashes by an enraged ascetic. If Ganga originally came to bring
salvation to Sagara�s 60,000 sons, the poor goddess has ended up
with a burden 10,000 times greater than she bargained for. It is for
the people of the peninsular India to decide whether they would share
the burden, should the interlinking of rivers come true!
Sudhirendar Sharma
Formerly with the World
Bank, Dr Sharma is a development writer associated with the
Delhi-based the Ecological Foundation. He can be reached at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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