The Ganga has nurtured civilisations in its basin for centuries, and continues to provide water for drinking and agriculture today. About 40% of India’s population live in the basin. Although the river’s purity is at the core of its huge religious importance in Hinduism, it is also one of India’s most polluted rivers. A concoction of untreated sewage and industrial waste continues to be pumped into its waters.
The river’s significance is such that tackling this pollution has been a government focus since 1985, when the Ganga Action Plan was launched. Successive governments have since expanded and attempted to improve the approach, but with little success. The latest attempt to clean the river is the Namami Gange Programme, launched by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, soon after he came to power.
A decade on, the government claims the project and its technology-first approach have succeeded where previous efforts had not. To investigate this claim, journalist Monika Mondal visited the sacred city of Varanasi (Benares), to assess the waters of the Ganga and two of its tributaries, the Varuna and Assi. She talked to local people and experts and visited the sewage treatment plants bearing most of the burden of the clean-up, publishing her findings in the Third Pole (now Dialogue Earth) in September 2023.
In this podcast, Mondal revisits her story, joining The Third Pole team to take a behind-the-scenes look at the work she did. With her is researcher Debarshee Dasgupta, who shares his insights on this most recent effort to clean the Ganga, and the complex structural challenges it faces.
If you go to this 5km stretch of Varanasi where there are a lot of tourists and people are coming to actually see the Ganga, you will see a cleaner Ganga. But [if] you just go a few metres away from this spot, you’ll see all the filth and all the cowsMonika Mondal, independent journalist
Guests
Monika Mondal, independent journalist
Debarshee Dasgupta, senior research associate, Centre for Policy Research
Credits
Hosts: Shalinee Kumari, Omair Ahmad
Producer: Shalinee Kumari
Audio edit and sound design: Sync Sound Sabha
Recording studio: Pindrop Media
Artwork: Sana Nasir
Thanks to: Lizi Hesling, Nanaui Amoros Silva, Chaia Dechen, Georgie Campbell
Music credits
“Alarm Cycle” by Blue Dot Sessions, licence: CC BY NC
“Borough” by Blue Dot Sessions, licence: CC BY NC
About the series
The Third Pole Podcast is a new Dialogue Earth series focusing on climate change and the environment in the Himalayan watershed. It aims to create a space for beyond-the-article conversations with our journalists and field experts. At the same time, we also ask questions about the state of environmental journalism in South Asia: why it’s needed, what issues it should be looking at and what challenges it faces.
