From a recent award winning book, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, he writes
Ok I guess Ganga is another spelling of the river. How bad is it these days? Why did it get so polluted? Wouldn’t the people there take pains at least to pollute another river if they have to? Or wouldn’t Hindu fanatics at least keep out chemical pollution from their holy waters?
I’m not Indian but I been to Varanasi several times and also to the Ganges at Rishikesh.
It’s clean at Rishikesh, and by the time it reaches Varanasi it’s pretty bad. The Gangetic plain between them is one of the most densely populated areas of India, there’s 200 million people just in Uttar Pradash state.
Most of those people have no proper sewage, pollution laws are either non-existant or not enforced, the waste has to go somewhere, it ends up in the Ganges.