Whenever I see the Ganges on tv it is just teeming with pilgrims bathing. From a public health standpoint this can’t be good. Is the river a cesspool of infection?
Pretty much, yeah.
You know it’s pretty bad when the ashes of the cremated dead * aren’t * the scariest things in the water.
Wow that’s even worse than I thought. Watching the bathing ritual on Discovery last night I noticed many mothers repeatedly dunking their babies and thought “that can’t be good”. Thanks for the great link.
When I was there I wondered the same thing. The waste water from Varanasi, the very large city on the bank of the Ganges, flows right into the river. There are also quite a few large towns up river as well. The dead are burned to a crisp so their ashes are not really much of a problem compared to whatever else is thrown into the Ganges.
The locals that I spoke to, however, claimed that the government tests the water periodically and there is seldom any problems. The other thing is that its usually not the locals who are in the river bathing who somehow might be immune from whatever is in the river. Its the Indian people who come from all over the country on a once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the Ganges who are bathing.
I went out in a boat and the water was full of silt, but it didn’t appear to be dirty in the sense that is was full of bacteria. The river also flows by the city pretty quickly.
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- The Ganges used to be a sewer, industrial waste dump and swimming pool all in one. They’re working on the “industrial waste” part of it, but not the other two.
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- The Ganges used to be a sewer, industrial waste dump and swimming pool all in one. They’re working on the “industrial waste” part of it, but not the other two.
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- Some years ago the Ganges suffered a great fire, when a large amount of flammable foamy industrial waste floating on it ignited and burned.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0795.09.html
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[QUOTE=DougC - Some years ago the Ganges suffered a great fire, when a large amount of flammable foamy industrial waste floating on it ignited and burned.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0795.09.html
~[/QUOTE]
Didn’t some river in the United States catch on fire a long time ago?
You know you need to enact better pollution control laws when…
The infamous burning river was the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, Ohio. It happened in 1969. Provided fodder for Cleveland jokes for years afterward, but also spurred getting the environment cleaned up there. Locally, an even more famous fire provided more laffs a few years later. The city’s Republican mayor in the early '70s was Ralph Perk, who had an embarrassing mishap at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The ribbon in this case was made of steel and he was supposed to cut it with an actyelene torch. He mishandled the torch and accidentally set his hair on fire. The picture of him screaming in fright with flames leaping off the top of his head was reproduced by local artists for years afterward.
I just re-read Robert Heinlein’s 1953 travel book Tramp Royale over the weekend, and in it he describes the river in Jakarta (The Cilewung, or Celiungse, I find, googling for the name Heinlein doesn’t give). His description of the river fifty years agho is disgusting : yellow and opaque, flowingh slowly, and used as well, bath, and sewer. Often at the same time. He saw people brushing their teeth and dipping up pans of water for cooking as the same time others were exfereting in it. Theitr guide explained that the people were very healthy, because “the sun, beating down on the ribver, killed the bacteria”. Heinlein thought he saw here an echo of the Middle Eastern belief that a stream purifies itself in three feet. (I haven’t heard precisely this before, although I’ve heard similar ideas. They all seem like wishful thinking.)
I hope the problem’s been alleviated and people educated. But the rivwer’s apparently still polluted:
http://www.ecologyasia.com/news-archives/2003/may-03/thejakartapost.com_20030524_1.htm
And it still gets raw sewage:
http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20040820.G03
Eek, I’ve bathed in the Ganga…went at 5 AM and nearly froze my butt off. That was a long time ago, but man it was an experience.
I think in your teen years you can shut your mind to what you’re really doing. 
When I visited Varnasi I was seriously considering bathing in it, y’know for the spiritual value and everything.
We rose at dawn to go out at watch the city wake up and come to the river. As I headed out of my guest house I stepped, half asleep, into a steaming pile of freshly deposited holy cow dung. It overwhelmed my flip flops and icked up my toes. Yuck.
No worries, I’ll just swish it around once we reach the river.
Once out on the Ganges, it was captivating in the sunrise, really awesome.
However, as others have mentioned the ashes of the dead were being added to the mix, and we passed several bloated dog carcasses floating down the river. The same river people were dunking their babies in, bathing in and brushing their teeth in. :eek:
Once back to my guest house I could not stop washing my foot. I never did go into the river to swim, it was too scary. 