The river that runs about 2,500 kilometers from the Himalayas across the northern plain of India and on into Bangladesh, where it joins the Brahmaputra and Meghna to reach the Bay of Bengal — worshipped by Hindus as the living goddess Ganga, depended on by hundreds of millions for water and farming, and ranked among the most polluted rivers on earth. A single channel that is at once the holiest river in Hinduism and a grave environmental crisis.
Hindus revere the Ganges as a goddess whose water washes away sin, and they carry their dead to her banks to be cremated and released. The same river receives the raw sewage of the cities along it, the runoff of farms, and the waste of tanneries, until, in places, its water is too foul to sustain river life. Hundreds of millions of people drink from it, bathe in it, and pray to it. It is, in the same breath, the holiest of all rivers to Hindus and one of the most polluted — and both descriptions are literally true at once.