River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India's FutureIndia is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. The waterway that has nourished more people than any on earth for three millennia is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health. Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost. As one Hindu sage told the author in Rishikesh on the banks of the upper Ganges (known to Hindus as the goddess Ganga) - 'If Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people is no small thing.' Drawing on four years of first-hand reporting and detailed historical and scientific research, Mallet delves into the religious, historical, and biological mysteries of the Ganges, and explains how Hindus can simultaneously revere and abuse their national river. Starting at the Himalayan glacier where the Ganges emerges pure and cold from an icy cave known as the Cow's Mouth and ending in the tiger-infested mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, Mallet encounters everyone from the naked holy men who worship the river, to the engineers who divert its waters for irrigation, the scientists who study its bacteria, and Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, who says he wants to save India's mother-river for posterity. Can they succeed in saving the river from catastrophe — or is it too late? |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 39
Page xi
... tributary of the Ganges. A gharial face to face with a grasshopper. Water-colour by Sita Ram, c. 1820. Indian security forces guard work crews repairing the vital Munak Canal that supplies Delhi after it was sabotaged by protesters in ...
... tributary of the Ganges. A gharial face to face with a grasshopper. Water-colour by Sita Ram, c. 1820. Indian security forces guard work crews repairing the vital Munak Canal that supplies Delhi after it was sabotaged by protesters in ...
Page xvi
... tributaries of the Ganges, is portrayed in India's legends and paintings and remem- bered in its histories as a natural paradise of lilies, turtles, and fish. On its banks, the cheerful god Krishna would play his flute amid a troupe of ...
... tributaries of the Ganges, is portrayed in India's legends and paintings and remem- bered in its histories as a natural paradise of lilies, turtles, and fish. On its banks, the cheerful god Krishna would play his flute amid a troupe of ...
Page xix
... tributaries—notably the Brahmaputra originating in Tibet—and the settlement and dispersal of pollutants along the way make it a lot more complicated than that. Chapter by chapter, then, we follow the Ganges on its downhill journey ...
... tributaries—notably the Brahmaputra originating in Tibet—and the settlement and dispersal of pollutants along the way make it a lot more complicated than that. Chapter by chapter, then, we follow the Ganges on its downhill journey ...
Page 4
... tributaries, but some Indian researchers say it is only the twentieth longest in Asia and forty-first in the world ... tributary the Brahmaputra—which rises in China on the Tibetan plateau as the Yarlung Tsangpo before plunging through ...
... tributaries, but some Indian researchers say it is only the twentieth longest in Asia and forty-first in the world ... tributary the Brahmaputra—which rises in China on the Tibetan plateau as the Yarlung Tsangpo before plunging through ...
Page 5
... tributaries such as the Ram Ganga. The main stream passes the north-eastern tip of Jharkhand state and crosses West Bengal before entering Bangladesh, where it is named the Padma; there it is joined by the mighty Brahmaputra and reaches ...
... tributaries such as the Ram Ganga. The main stream passes the north-eastern tip of Jharkhand state and crosses West Bengal before entering Bangladesh, where it is named the Padma; there it is joined by the mighty Brahmaputra and reaches ...
Contents
1 | |
8 | |
Holy Waters | 23 |
How to Build a Megacityand Save the Ganges | 39 |
Varanasi Indias Capital for a Day | 45 |
Varanasi Broken Promises | 63 |
Toxic River | 74 |
Superbug River | 96 |
A Bollywood Star Ganga on Film | 175 |
Exotic River Foreigners on the Ganges | 183 |
Storms and Sandbanks Boats on the Ganges | 198 |
Trade Artery No More Calcutta and Bengal | 207 |
Mission Impossible? How to Clean the Ganges | 229 |
Beautiful Forest Where Ganga Meets the Ocean | 253 |
Notes | 265 |
Bibliography | 296 |
Dolphins Crocodiles and Tigers | 114 |
People Pressure Why Population Growth Is Not a Dividend | 136 |
Water and Wells Why the Taps Run Dry | 149 |
Dams and Droughts Engineering the Ganges | 160 |
Publishers Acknowledgements | 302 |
Picture Acknowledgements | 303 |
Index | 305 |
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Common terms and phrases
Allahabad antibiotic resistance antibiotics Asia August bacteria Bangladesh banks bathe Bay of Bengal Bihar boats British Calcutta canal cent century Chambal cleaning the Ganges climate change culture dams Delhi delta dolphins downstream east effluent environmental Financial fish floods flow Ganga Ganges water Gangetic Gangotri Gaumukh gene gharials ghat glacier goddess groundwater Haridwar heavy metals Himalayas Hindu holy Hooghly human Indus industrial Interview irrigation Kanpur kilometres Kolkata Kolkata Port Trust Kumbh Mela live million Modi's monsoon mouth Mughal Muslim Narendra Modi north India official Pakistan Patna pilgrims pollution population port prime minister problem projects pumping religious resistance river sadhus Sagar Sanskrit Saraswati says September 2016 sewage treatment Shiva Singh Sinha stream Sunderbans tanneries temple Thames tigers tion told town toxic treatment plants tributaries Uma Bharti upper Ganges upstream Uttar Pradesh Varanasi Victor Mallet village waste waterways wildlife Xuanzang Yamuna