An article in peopleandplanet.net dated August 05. 2005, titled: “Challenging apathy to clean up deadly Ganges.”
This is a story on Prof. Veer Bhadra Mishra and his Ganges project. He was head of civil engineering department at our college. His passion for a project for clean up of Ganges made him “Hero of the planet” by the Times magazine in 1999.
Excerpts from the article:
Challenging apathy to clean up the deadly Ganges
Posted: 05 Aug 2005
The Campaign for a Clean Ganges is trying to create heightened public awareness in India and abroad to cleanse the world's most important river: lifeline for nearly 500 million people. It is also pioneering a pond treatment system to clean up the pollution which is killing many thousands of Indian children every year. Here Ganges river activist Roger Choate reports on the uphill battle to clean this most holy of rivers.
The nationwide campaign is led by a bold Brahmin, Dr Veer Bhadra Mishra, who uniquely combines his roles as a professor of hydraulics and also as Hindu high priest (Mahantji) to press for cleanup of the river flowing alongside his ancestral home. Not surprisingly, the long-running campaign seeks to combine Hindu cultural values with the empirical evidence of water contamination.
This is not always easy, to put it mildly. Many ordinary Hindus cannot grasp the thought that the river they literally worship as spiritually pure is in fact materially damaged. Nor is the concept of collective civic action very well understood. The Indian Government does not help matters by suppressing its own river pollution statistics. Measurements must thus be taken by private organizations.
As India's oldest environmental campaign, we first got underway back in 1982. Many battles later, in 1999, Time Magazine nominated Mahantji as "hero for the planet" for awakening global opinion to the plight of the polluted Ganges where millions live along her banks. "Bathing in it. Drinking it. Washing clothes in it, irrigating their fields, dying by it and then having their ashes borne away by it," as British Writer Eric Newby put it.