Bloomberg Originals14 min
Modi Promised to Clean the Ganges. This Is What Happened
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- The Ganges river system supports approximately 600 million people and contributes over 40% to India's GDP, serving as a central pillar of agriculture, industry, and religious belief.
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the "Namami Gange" initiative in 2014, committing $4.5 billion—the highest financial allocation to date—to clean the river of sewage and toxic industrial waste.
- An investigation by Bloomberg News spanning ten years and 1,900 kilometers utilized satellite data, ground testing, and interviews to evaluate the program's efficacy against Modi's 12-year governance record.
- Only about one in ten stretches of the river show consistent improvement over the last decade, with satellite data indicating worsening turbidity, higher nutrient loads, and warmer water temperatures in most sections.
- In Haridwar, a designated testing ground for public-private funding models, satellite imagery reveals the river is muddying in both pre- and post-monsoon seasons despite claims of five new sewage treatment plants and connected drains.
- Riverbed mudding is driven by widespread construction and sand mining.
- Religious festivals overwhelm facilities, with 7.5 million pilgrims visiting in a single day, rendering infrastructure built for permanent populations insufficient.
- Residents in downstream villages report severe health impacts, including skin lesions, stomach infections, and nail deformities, alongside agricultural failures caused by contaminated water.
- Experts warn that arsenic-laden water used for irrigation enters India's food chain, though limited disease tracking prevents a full assessment of the health scale.
- In Kanpur, India's leather capital, satellite data shows improvement in the pre-monsoon window but increased muddiness post-monsoon.
- While major drains have been capped, more than a dozen others release raw sewage directly into the river, with reports of nighttime discharges to evade detection.
- Independent testing by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, found river water in Kanpur exceeding government safety standards for bathing and drinking water pollution at more than twice the permissible limit.
- Satellite imagery cannot detect dissolved oxygen, fecal coliform, heavy metals, or pathogens; independent chemical testing revealed:
- Irrigation channels containing treated tannery wastewater with severe pollution.
- Drinking water wells in Jana village with fluoride levels four times the limit and nitrate levels twice the limit, posing risks of bone damage and impaired oxygen transport.
- In Varanasi, the Prime Minister's parliamentary constituency, urbanization has increased rapidly alongside significant infrastructure investment, yet water remains unsafe for human use.
- The government has targeted a goal of making the river fit for bathing by the 2029 election.
- Cremation practices continue to be a major source of pollution, as the belief in the river's self-purifying capacity prevents restrictions on disposing of ashes and bodies.
- Compounding the pollution crisis, groundwater extraction has depleted the aquifers that historically fed the Ganges, reducing the river's natural flow and survival capacity.
- Scientific analysis has identified persistent organic pollutants seeping from the river into urban and rural centers, contributing to the disappearance of species such as the gharial.
- Through 2025, only about half of the funds allocated for the Namami Gange project were spent, while industries continue to flout pollution norms.
- Experts conclude that while infrastructure can mitigate visible pollution, meaningful cleanup requires uniform investment distribution and increased capital, as the current trajectory shows water quality deteriorating in the majority of monitored segments.