At first glance, the Ganga in India’s eastern Bihar bears some resemblance to a beautiful, sacred river. Few places are as beautiful as the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary. This is the only sanctuary legally designated for India’s national aquatic animal, the blind, side-swimming, most ancient of all cetaceans: the endangered Gangetic river dolphin, Platanista gangetica gangetica. Stretching over 67 km of the river, the sanctuary lies between Sultanganj and Kahalgaon.
With me are researchers Nachiket Kelkar of the Ashoka Trust for Research on Ecology and the Environment and Subhasis Dey of Vikramshila Biodiversity Research and Education Centre, who have been working in this area on the ecology of river dolphins and fisheries for over a decade.
As we coast along the river, a row of toddy palms comes into view on the distant south bank. A couple of decades ago, the river lapped at those palms; today the waterline is about half a kilometre away.
It is the first visual marker we get of the extent to which flows in the Ganga have been steadily reducing; this summer, before the monsoon rains, it is at an all-time low, the depth sensor tells us.
Tear-shaped diaras (silt islands) dotted with clumps of sedge and grass and local vegetation rise about a foot or two from the water. These islands that emerge from the river, only to be reclaimed by her, are full of life. Two bright-beaked skimmers perch on one edge; lesser whistling teals brown an opposite edge; open-billed storks forage in the shallows; a row of hard-shelled tent turtles basking in the sun plop back into the river in sudden alarm at the put-put of our boat.
Walls of silt rise up from the green waters on both sides of the river, pocked, like ancient computer punch-cards, with bank-mynah homes. The birds flit in an out, dipping and rising in a murmur.
A grave greater adjutant stork wades past us, its wizened face wary as it examines us. Two more display their massive black and white wingspans further out on the diara, and a fourth makes an awkward landing. This region of eastern Bihar has been a breeding site for the endangered species (only the third area in the world where they breed), and there is reportedly a stable population of 300 individuals.
All along the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, diaras are claimed and owned’, farmed and patrolled. The silt is as fertile as it gets, and the claim across the basin is that vegetables grown on these silt-islands are the tastiest in the world.
Silt transforms floodplains into food bowls. Silt makes deltas. Silt is the silent, unassuming hero of South Asia. And the Ganga is probably the siltiest river in the whole world, even more than the Amazon.
Tumbling down from the Gangotri glacier some 1,500 km to the north-west, in Uttarakhand’s Himalayas, the Ganga begins its descent as Bhagirathi. Mixing Alakananda into itself at the multihued confluence of Devaprayag, the river cleaves the Himalayan mountains, picking up massive amounts of silt along the way, and hurtles down towards the plains. Its white waters roil past Rishikesh, placate at Haridwar, and flow down towards the floodplains of Uttar Pradesh.
The holy river turns putrid at Kanpur, and her water is so severely extracted that she is little but sand when she flows into Allahabad. Here, the waters of Chambal remake her flows via the Yamuna. Defying all scientific odds, her dark waters purify a million sins at Varanasi while taking into herself more foul foam and faecal matter, chemicals and cadavers.
Then she flows into Bihar.
After suffering the conurbations and confusions of modern civilisation, the river is renewed. The Ghagra, Gandak and Koshi rivers, coming down from Nepal, infuse the Ganga with fresh life. In Bihar it is the sum of its tributaries. The Ganga meanders now with fresh waters, and braids its way through the floodplains for another thousand kilometres, down to West Bengal and Bangladesh and then to the Bay of Bengal.
On paper, the VGDS is a protected stretch of river, but in a heavily human-dominated landscape. The people all along the route, from Sultanganj to the eastern limit of the sanctuary at Kahalgaon, use the river for various purposes. There are around 3,000 fishing families in the area that depend directly on the river, as they have for generations.
In 1991, the Ganga Mukti Andolan led the effort to free the Ganga from the “panidars” the feudal water lords who are the river-equivalent of zamindars (landlords). They laid claim to stretches of the river and owned everything in that stretch, including the fishing and even the use of the river. Fishers were free to choose whether to work or not. But if they worked, and refused to pay 50% of the fish catch (which was the norm), they were threatened.
The abolition of the feudal water-lords was much needed, but the freeing of the Ganga from oppressive contracts became a double-edged sword. Now, anyone could fish anywhere. While that seemed a win at first blush, it has proved disastrous for both traditional fishermen and the river ecology.
There is a simple way to tell the traditional’ fishermen from the free riders. Those who know how to weave a net by hand, from thread are the real deal. If fishing in the Ganga were restricted to hand-made nets, the fishermen believe, the river would be fecund still. While reality may be a little more complicated, this nevertheless serves as a good starting point.