Holy man, secular plan: clean up the River Ganges

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Most mornings, as the sun stealsover the Ganges, Veer Bhadra Mishra takes a dip in India's holiestriver. As high priest of a Hindu temple, it is his solemn duty. Butas a scientist, the ritual is profoundly discomforting.
The Ganges, revered as a symbol of spiritual purity for more than2,000 years, is today a filthy soup. This is especially true in theancient pilgrimage site of Varanasi, where 32 old pipes on theriverbank disgorge raw sewage into the flow.
"I have a rationally trained mind," says the retiredprofessor of hydraulics, who says he has contracted potentiallyfatal diseases from Ganges water. "But I also have apassionately committed heart."
Mr. Mishra has used both in a 20-year river cleanup campaign nowcoming to fruition. With his spiritual clout in a country that'smore than 80 percent Hindu and his scientific expertise, Mishra haswon government approval for a pilot sewage-treatment program.
Religious imagery is never far from the lyrical speech of Mishra,who couches his environmental language in terms of saving the"Ganga Ma," or the Mother Ganges. Even more than thecompassion he shows for the well-being of Hindus, he seems mostconcerned about the health of Hinduism - how a dirty river mightdamage the faith.
Mishra inherited the role of high priest of the 400-year-old SankatMochan temple when he was 14 years old, following a centuries-oldtradition of passing the job from father to eldest son.
But he has also been driven by scientific curiosity, becoming thefirst family high priest to wear Western-style trousers and toattend university. Later, he became a professor at Varanasi'srenowned Benares Hindu University.
In 1982, he set up the Sankat Mochan Foundation - named after histemple - which has led the city's clean-river campaign with anunusual mixture of science and spirituality.
A meeting with the prime minister
More than a decade ago, with scientists from the University ofCalifornia in Berkeley, Mishra developed what many environmentalexperts attest is a cheap, sustainable system for diverting thecity's sewage away from the river, and cleaning it.
The scheme was unanimously accepted by the city council nearly adecade ago, but the state and central governments rejected it.Gentle-mannered Mishra continued his tenacious lobbying, and lastyear secured a meeting with prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Last month, he heard what he describes as "the best news in 20years."
On June 30, the central government wrote to him, telling him itwould support a pilot run of his scheme in Varanasi and suggestingit would hold back support for a much costlier, ineffective stategovernment-led scheme.
"If the result is convincing, it will be difficult for thegovernment to refuse to roll it out," he says, with a broadsmile. He says he is confident the system will not disappoint, butonly hopes that the government will reverse years of"disastrous" policy on the Ganges.
The Ganges flows over 1,500 miles, from the Himalayas across thedensely populated plains of India, into Bangladesh, before gushinginto the Bay of Bengal.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how sacred the river is toHindus, who see it as an incarnation of the god Ganga.
"Man becomes pure by the touch of the water, or by consumingit, or by expressing its name," says Lord Vishnu in theRamayana, a poem written in the fourth century BC.
But while India's Hindus have maintained their reverence for theriver, modernization - in the form of speedy population growth,urbanization, and industrialization - has sullied it. There aremore than 100 cities, numerous towns, and countless villagesscattered along its banks. Some 500 million people are dependentupon the Ganges for water. As it has been siphoned off forirrigation, its water levels have fallen.
Climate change is also taking a disastrous toll. The HimalayanGangotri glacier, the source of most of the Ganges' water duringIndia's long, hot summers, is shrinking by 40 yards a year, sayscientists. By 2030, they warn, it could disappear altogether -making the Ganges dependent upon erratic monsoon rains.
While environmentalists urge India, a top greenhouse-gas producer,to take action, Mishra says that an opportunity is being lost totackle the much simpler problem of domestic sewage pollution.
Few of the fast-growing cities and towns along the Ganges' banks -indeed, few in India, period - have sewage treatment plants. Butthe problem is especially crucial in Varanasi, where millions ofHindus make annual pilgrimages to pray and ritually bathe on thebroad stone steps that lead down to the river from the riverbanktemples.
The World Health Organisation, which labels dirty water as theleading cause of child deaths in India, says the coliform bacteriacount is some 3,000 times higher than it considers safe.
That hasn't stopped the pilgrims at its banks, however, who may beunaware of such concerns.
Small boys water bomb into the river beside pious elderly mendressed in loin cloths who pour water over their heads. Sari-cladwomen murmur prayers as they scatter fragrant rose and jasminepetals, seemingly oblivious to the small islands of reeking rubbishthat float by.
India's government, however, has been aware of the problem for sometime. Twenty years ago, it launched the Ganga Action Plan (GAP), amultimillion-dollar scheme intended to clean up the river by meansof wastewater treatment plants.
Replacement for government plan?
A near-consensus among experts exists that GAP has been anexpensive disaster. The plants handle only a small amount of thesewage generated along the river. Because they rely on electricalpumps during power cuts - frequent in India - even the small amountof sewage they're meant to handle often flows into the river. And,experts say, when the floodwaters rise, sewage enters the slumpwell of the pumps, stopping operations for months of the year.
Most seriously, the GAP system is designed to remove solid wastebut not microorganisms. Mishra's scheme is different. Hisadaptation of an "advanced integrated wastewater pondsystem" (AIWPS) developed by Prof. William Oswald at Berkeleyand in operation in parts of California, is, experts say, suitablefor a tropical climate like India's.
Instead of depending on scarce supplies of electricity, the systemwould use gravity to carry sewage to four big pools, built onwasteland several miles outside the city, where it would be brokendown by bacteria, algae, and sunlight.
An independent assessment found the plan was cheaper and moreeffective than the existing scheme. He hopes that his pilot projectmay one day become a model for other Indian towns and cities. Buthis inspiration remains the Ganges.
"All our rivers have stories," he says, as a wooden boatof pilgrims floats by his window, trailing flickering floatingcandles in the gathering dusk. "All our rivers are important.But there is nothing anywhere like the Ganga."