How India's Success Is Killing Its Holy River

From the Himalayas to the plains, rampant growth is turning the Ganges into a toxic sewer. It's not too late to put things right

By Jyoti Thottam/Pipola Monday, July 19, 2010
    • Lynsey Addario / VII Network for TIME

    Hindus bathe in the Ganges at Varanasi, where the pollution is finally getting attention

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    Dammed and Damned
    The Tehri Dam is the grandest fulfillment of Jawaharlal Nehru's hope that dams would be the "temples of modern India." The dam wall is 870 ft. (265 m) high — taller than the Hoover Dam — and when completed, the dam formed a reservoir 47 miles (75 km) long that completely submerged the old town of Tehri. But the dam is also a stark example of how quickly a place with abundant water resources can turn into one plagued by shortage. There are more than 100 villages like Pipola scattered around the reservoir's rim, and they feel that shortage acutely. The villages can't get water from the lake itself — the walls of the reservoir are the exposed sides of a blasted mountain made of loose gravel too steep to climb — and the construction of the dam has disrupted the underground sources of the area's natural springs. So the residents of Pipola are lobbying Ramesh Pokhriyal, chief minister of Uttarakhand state, for a pumping station. When I met him in Dehra Dun, the state's capital, he insisted that all the affected villages near the Tehri Dam would be helped "in due course of time."

    The local water shortage is a minor obstacle to his much larger ambitions for the state. Pokhriyal, known as Nishank ("he who is without doubt"), has a plan to turn Uttarakhand into an investor-friendly, eco-friendly mountain paradise. "Even Switzerland is nothing compared to us," Pokhriyal says. He wants to promote adventure sports, ayurvedic spas, organic food and spiritual tourism, along with heavy industry. Pokhriyal plans to build 10 more dams over the next few years to fund his vision, but there may not be enough water in the area's rivers to fill them: water levels are declining across the state. Uttarakhand rushed to hydropowered development so quickly that it went from a power surplus to a power deficit in just the past two years. Hydropower officials blame climate change; activists blame damage to the rivers' catchment areas. Whatever the cause, the Tehri Dam hasn't come close to delivering the amount of power or water that was expected. On the day I visited, it was running at 25% capacity. To meet demand for power, the dam actually pumps water back upstream and reuses it.

    Capital Waste
    From the Tehri Dam, the Upper Ganga Canal channels clean drinking water 121 miles (194 km) downstream to the nation's capital. Thanks to this bounty and supplies from its own river, the Yamuna, Delhi enjoys a water availability of 66 gal. (250 L) per person per day — comparable to the amount consumed in much of Europe. As Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and the Environment, puts it, "Delhi is a pampered city."

    Very few of the city's residents experience that abundance. Delhi loses about half the water it gets to leakage, from both decaying pipes and theft, and what's left isn't evenly distributed. The privileged parts of central Delhi get as much as 132 gal. (500 L) of water per capita per day; others get only 8 gal. (30 L). And so in Delhi, as in Tehri, the poor line up at municipal water tankers and hand pumps. The Sonia Vihar pumping station, which opened in 2006, was meant to ease chronic water shortages by using supplies from the Tehri Dam. But there isn't enough water in the reservoir, and Sonia Vihar has been operating below its expected capacity of 140 million gal. (530 million L) per day for the past two years.

    Delhi's water inequity is one of the many widening gaps between rich and poor in this booming city. Another is sanitation. The city's population has exploded by 60% since 1995, but Delhi has failed to invest in underground sewer lines to keep pace. More than 6 million people remain unconnected to any sewer line (mainly because they live in unauthorized housing settlements), and their wastewater flows into open drains. When the Yamuna River leaves Delhi, it is unable to support any but the smallest aquatic life.

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