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ENVIRONMENT:
ADI GANGA
Muck
Battle
The Adi
Ganga is so dirty Calcuttans refuse to immerse idols in it. Now the people
demand a clean-up.
By Labonita
Ghosh
In
1775, Major William Tolly had a problem. The ship carrying his wife Anna
Maria would dock in Calcutta that summer, but how could he save her the
long, hot inland ride to their estates in east Bengal? Simple-just take
the ship all the way. Tolly got the distributary leading from the main
Hooghly river right up to east Bengal extended. In six months, an excellent
cross-country waterway was created and Anna Maria practically sailed to
her front door. "That's probably the last time anyone spruced up
the Adi Ganga," says aeronautical engineer Barin De, on the canal
that was renamed Tolly Nullah after the enterprising Englishman.
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| Fighting
Filth: Conservationists on protest |
But it's
a curiously prophetic moniker: for the Adi Ganga has now become what activist
R. Bhattacharjee calls "a 15-km toilet dispenser". The canal
that extends from the city's port area of Hastings right up to suburban
Baruipur-touching most of south Calcutta-is today an unbroken river of
sludge, stink and toxins.
Recently,
De and his wife Mamata, along with 50 other Calcuttans and a clutch of
conservationists, began a unique protest to demand the canal's clean-up.
They enlisted an unlikely supporter-Goddess Durga. This year, following
Durga Puja, people in the Des' neighbourhood refused to immerse their
idols in the Adi Ganga. Instead, the largest one has been put on display
at the Des' guesthouse. No pandal, no daily offerings, it's a deliberate
desecration. "Our Durga is on a hunger-strike to save the Adi Ganga,"
says Mamata De.
The idea
struck Barin De last year while watching an immersion in the Tolly Nullah.
A 12-ft clay idol that was being given a ceremonial send-off bobbed up
instantly. After a long struggle, the worshippers-much to De's horror-made
a boy stand on the idol. "They got him to stamp on its face,"
says an outraged De. "Is this any way to treat the goddess we call
our mother?"
For the south
Calcutta families who immerse their idols in the Adi Ganga-because of
tradition or proximity-this last stage of the festivities is now an annual
headache. The canal, which is only 10 ft deep, has a 5-ft bed of alluvium.
It's been a decade since it was dredged (work on the first 1.5 km was
begun in 1998, but stopped for want of an appropriate dredger) and with
immersions every year the silt bed only rises. "Bengalis have six
pujas crammed into five months," says air pollution activist S.M.
Ghosh, who propelled the Des into the Adi Ganga Protection Committee.
"That's almost 650 idols in the Tolly Nullah every year."
On September
29, when a freak high tide hit Calcutta, the silt-clogged Adi Ganga overflowed.
The dirty water spread and inundated Union minister Mamata Banerjee's
home. That kickstarted the Des' protest: if the Government doesn't clean
up-and quickly-next year they plan to move court to ban all immersions
in the Adi Ganga.
A lawsuit
on similar grounds-this time involving the main Hooghly river-was filed
last week by a Howrah green group. But as usual, officials have no answer.
They're busy playing political tag. Says Trinamool Congress leader and
Mayor-in-Council, Sewerage, Rajib Deb: "We just took over the cmc
four months ago. How can I tell you why the previous (Left Front) officials
neglected the project?" Mayor Subrata Mukherjee, offering some promises,
adds, "We haven't done much yet, but soon there'll be too much activity
for Calcuttans to handle."
In 1985,
the Tolly Nullah was included in the ambitious Ganga Action Plan Phase
II, which also covers the smaller canals that criss-cross Calcutta and
its outskirts. But apart from some cosmetic uplifts, very little has been
done. "The corporation did carry out some preliminary work like dredging
parts of the canal and evicting about 800 encroachers in 1999," says
Raghavendra Das, chief engineer in charge of the project. But removing
and rehabilitating over 40,000 encroachers will take at least four years,
he adds. Till then, they will have to rely on divine intervention.
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar
