New York Times (May 22, 2012)
European Pressphoto Agency
A man praying in the Ganges River in May 2004.
KOLKATA, India — India is embarking on an expensive last-ditch attempt
to restore the heavily polluted Ganges River basin, home to 400 million
people. The cleanup will take decades and cost tens of billions of
dollars. The World Bank, which has already ponied up $1 billion in
loans and grants, classifies it as “high” risk.
Despite the risk — the dangers posed by corruption, incompetence and
political parochialism — the National Ganges River Basin Project is a
great idea, one that could improve the health of millions of people
while also boosting India’s economy.
The project is unprecedented in its complexity. Other dying rivers,
including the Rhine and the Danube, have seen pricey turnarounds, but
experts say they were child’s play compared with the challenge of
restoring the Ganges.
The Ganges River runs through five separate states, each of them poor,
each governed by a different political party, each rife with
corruption. Most of the money for the Ganges cleanup will go to the
authorities of those states, and of dozens of grimy towns, for the
construction of sewage treatment plants and other infrastructure. The
biggest and most populous of the Ganges states, Uttar Pradesh, has in
recent years become a giant crime scene, as politicians and bureaucrats
have looted hundreds of millions of dollars — some say billions — in
health funds and food subsidies.
Even if corruption weren’t a factor, local administrators are the
plan’s weakest link: most don’t have the skills to manage big projects.
And there are far too few of them. India has only one-fifth of the
civil servants per capita that the United States has.
Fixing the river will also require more efficient agricultural
practices. One of the biggest factors in the Ganges’ decline is the
volume of water diverted to irrigation: a whopping 90 percent. Getting
farmers to switch to water-efficient crops and methods will be a major
challenge.
Then there’s tradition. Millions of Hindu pilgrims will have to be
persuaded to cease dumping idols, beads and corpses in the river. These
practices account for five percent of the river’s pollution.
India tried reviving the river once before, and failed. The 1985 Ganges
Action Plan cost $250 million over 20 years and succeeded in treating
only 35 percent of the raw sewage then pouring into the river.
Population growth has reversed many of those gains, as has poor
maintenance of the infrastructure created during that effort.
One difference today is that the public seems to be on board. In a
damning 2007 report on the shortcomings of the first Ganges cleanup,
the environmentalist Rakesh Jaiswal lamented that “environmental
concerns in India continue to be the burden of a few green crusaders.”
But thanks to a recent spate of high-profile hunger strikes, the river
is grabbing headlines and airtime.
The Indian government says it has learned from past mistakes in
planning and execution. The World Bank claims transparency and audits
can suppress corruption. The expertise of the country’s seven Indian
Institutes of Technology has also been harnessed to the task.
So, is a Ganges cleanup worth the trouble? Absolutely. The price tag
and the risks may be high, but the cost of doing nothing would prove
even greater.
Across the Ganges basin, water-borne diseases cost families $4 billion
a year. Delivering clean water to hundreds of millions of households
could have an explosive effect on public health and productivity.
Here’s one example: a single $43 million plan to connect the homes of
300,000 mostly poor residents of Kanpur to a treatment plant built
during the first cleanup would save $13 million in health expenses
every year, according to the World Bank.
Cleaning up the Ganges isn’t just choosing to save the river over
watching it expire. It’s choosing hope over cynicism, and the
progressive India everyone wants over the corrupt and mediocre one
citizens so frequently get.
Against the evidence, I’m betting on the good.
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