How can rivers that are so sacred be so dirty, is a question that struck American environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy when she travelled across India and Nepal. She couldn’t find the answer and so applied for a Fulbright fellowship to research the subcontinent’s waters, rivers, and lakes.
In Dirty, Sacred Rivers Colopy travels across the subcontinent’s water towers in the mountains of Nepal and India accompanying glaciologists and hydrologists studying the impact of climate change. She examines the appalling opportunity cost of Nepal’s inability of harness its hydropower and talks to experts about receding water tables, salination, and the worsening cycles of floods and droughts. But the bulk of the book is devoted to South Asia’s inability to meet the growing water demand of its increasing and increasingly affluent population.
Colopy avoids the trap of trying to find cultural reasons why Hindus in particular seem to not care about cleanliness of their sacred rivers and mountain tops. There would probably be clues in the fatalism and determinism prevalent in our cultures, but as Colpy correctly points out, the reasons boil down to mismanagement, lack of accountability, poor governance, faulty and inappropriate engineering paradigms, and ill-advised development. The result is the destruction of rivers in the name of progress and the stench of sewage on the banks of the Yamuna in New Delhi or the Bagmati in Kathmandu which provides overpowering olfactory proof of societal decay.
Dirty, Sacred Rivers takes us from the shrinking Gangotri and Ngozumba glaciers in India and Nepal, the ineffective embankments on the Kosi in Bihar that has made the problem of monsoon flooding worse, down to the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans. The book doesn’t read like an academic treatise, instead with her descriptions of the landscapes and the colourful characters she meets along the way, it feels more like a travelogue told in the first person. It would be of interest to even those who are not very interested in rivers.
Water is so important for life, for human society, and for civilisation that we ignore it at our own peril. Colopy doesn’t understand why India’s capital, which has built an underground metro of international standards, cannot clean up the Yamuna. India’s Supreme Court directed the Delhi municipality to restore the Yamuna’s waters to ‘bathing quality’, but raw sewage continues to pour into the sacred river. Why? Water expert Ramaswamy Iyer sums it up: “It’s just not a priority.” Why not, one wants to ask. A man covering his nose by the banks of the Yamuna tells Colopy: “It is not the river that is dirty, it is our minds and hearts.” But how Delhi deals with sewage management in the coming years will have serious lessons for Kathmandu.
Colopy’s book isn’t just a tale of woe about South Asia’s water crisis. She tracks down pioneers who are trying to come up with solutions. In India she meets Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh Toilets, Sheel Raj Sethi, designer of the ‘eco-san’ latrine. Waste mismanagement in South Asian cities is largely a result of the status symbol of a flush toilet that uses chlorinated drinking water to wash waste into non-existent sewage treatment systems. In Nepal, she meets Roshan Raj Shrestha an urban planner who practices what he preaches in his eco-home with rain harvesting, toilet waste, and compost used to fertilise his garden.
She travels to Melamchi and talks to experts about how the much-delayed white elephant may not actually solve Kathmandu’s water shortage. She questions why the original Norwegian plan to generate electricity from the tunnel at Sundarijal and make Melamchi a multi-purpose project was abandoned.
She devotes an entire chapter to the dhunge dhara Malla-era water spouts and their network of channels that are still a vital part of Kathmandu’s water supply system. She speaks to water experts like Ratna Sansar Shrestha and Dipak Gyawali and is clearly convinced by their arguments.
Colopy’s book should be essential reading for all urban planners, water specialists, and the private sector to examine the interface between traditional water management practices, current mismanagement, and how climate change is set to make the whole problem much more acute.
South Asia’s water crisis is already having political implications and this will only intensify in future.
Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis
by Cheryl Colopy
Oxford University Press, 2012
400 pages
www.oup.com