Varanasi/New Delhi: Thrice a week, Gopal Pandey descends Tulsi Ghat’s steep steps, gingerly carrying a Styrofoam box. The box holds two sterilized glass beakers, a funny-looking metal cylinder with a hole in its lid, and two brown bottles of chemical reagent. Pandey may set off by boat for another spot on the river, or he may choose to work right there.
With one beaker, Pandey scoops water from the surface of the Ganga; the other he inserts into the cylinder, lowers the apparatus 50cm below the surface, and collects the water there. With the reagent, he immediately stabilizes the oxygen levels. Then, he climbs back up the ghat to the lab at Sankat Mochan Foundation, Varanasi’s most strident agitator for a clean Ganga; at the lab, where he is an assistant, Pandey tests oxygen and bacteria counts. He posts his results on the foundation’s website, and they are unfailingly depressing reminders of the Ganga’s despoilment.
On the Ganga, Varanasi is an atypical city. While Kanpur and Allahabad ruin the river with quantities of industrial effluents, Varanasi relies entirely on domestic sewage from an urban population that has risen from a million in 1991 to 1.7 million today. Kanpur worries about heavy metal toxicity; Varanasi worries about bacteria attacking pilgrims and residents, who believe the city’s water is forever pure.
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Like a tour guide, Raja Mani Tiwari, a former engineer at the Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam, takes this reporter through the length of Varanasi’s impact on the Ganga. He begins upstream, at the Nagwa Nala—an open drain that looks from afar like a miniature waterfall. “The nala is really the Assi river, which has been diverted and let out here,” Tiwari observes.
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There are 32 point sources of sewage in Varanasi, drains of varying breadth and volume, all part of a sewer network that is, in many parts, 300 years old. To divert some of this sewage to two treatment plants, five pumping stations have been erected on various ghats—stubby pink towers that have been painted with murals of Shiva in a dubious attempt to blend them into the cityscape. (“How can five stations be enough for 32 drains?” Veer Bhadra Mishra, the foundation’s president, asks rhetorically. Then he contradictorily adds: “And if they build 32 such stations, what happens to the façade of this holy town?”)