River of Life, River of Death

Victor Mallet is an FT journalist who is based in New Delhi between 2012 and 2016, which gave him a chance to research and write this brilliant and fascinating book about the Ganges, covering, as Lord Stern observes, history, geography, environment, politics and religion. The title indicates the thesis, also passionately advocated by Swami Saraswati that if Ganga dies, India dies. If Ganga thrives, India thrives. The lives of 500 million people are not a small thing. In his view, it will be a journey from filth to faith. It is striking to read historical accounts when the river was much less polluted than it is now, but it turns out that its sacredness and the purity associated with this is one paradoxical factor that has held back the necessary action to clean it up. The scale of the challenge is daunting, especially in view of continued population increase (300 million in 1947, 1.3 billion in 2016 and a projection of 1.7 billion by 2050) and the chronic lack of proper sewage and toilet facilities with severe pollution implications for every river, not just the Ganges. Population pressure also impacts water supply, and the author demolishes the argument for a demographic dividend. He discusses parallels with the cleaning up of the Thames and the Rhine, but the challenge of the Ganges is an order of magnitude greater, as Prime Minister Modi realises. Not only the essential cleanup, but also the fact that 70% of the flow of Ganges consists of meltwater from the Himalayas, where the glaciers are in the process of disappearing. The author has performed a great service by highlighting the scale of the problem as well as conveying the overall significance of the Ganges for India and its future.