India's Dirty Water

 Revered by the Hindu religion as an iconic Goddess, these so called sacred waters of the Ganges River is a medical nightmare just waiting to happen. The river, which runs 1560 miles is India's major lifeline. A lifeline than is renowned for its beauty and filth and pollution. The river is intensely polluted and the millions that seek its purity are only fooling themselves, it will not clean your sins away but most likely cause serious infections to any open wound. The Goddess of all rivers has the opposite effect.

India's rapid growth is a good and bad thing. A shortage of funds has allowed 70% of India's cities to dump their municipal raw sewage into the river. Only 30% of the cities treat the water before it is dumped. However, India has embarked on a new bold plan to ensure that by 2020 no untreated sewage enters the Ganges by spending $4 billion dollars.

The Ganges could be called the Satanic Waterway because more than 500,000 people of the 10 million deaths in India from waterborne diseases attributed to pollution. The river itself supports 400 million people, mostly Hindu and consider the iconic river a "Goddess" to cleanse one's sins. The filth of the Ganges is obvious in the scientific world. Recent tests conducted at Tulsi Ghat, one of India's holiest cities, was conducted at the city's bathing sites (84 of them).  In just 100mm of water, 29000 fecal coliform bacteria were found. That is enough to cause disease. The safety limits are only 500 fecal coliform bacteria per 100mm. Worse, another sample further downstream found 10,000,000 bacteria in 100mm of water, mostly E-coli.

India's government is working with a California firm in Berkeley to create the waste water technology to treat 10 million gallons of sewage daily. It is a good thing India has finally decided to address the issue because those "who are in the know" there clearly state the river is in a very serious polluted condition the further downstream tests are conducted.

The Ganges is a Goddess in disguise.