[Every year, a four-day festival to
the sun god Surya highlights the Indian city’s extreme air and water pollution,
with a river so filled with foam it resembles a blizzard’s aftermath.]
By Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar, Photographs
by Saumya Khandelwal
It was a much needed warning for
the thousands of families in attendance for the four-day Hindu festival of
Chhath that ended on Thursday, a celebration of the sun deity Surya that
involves fasting and making offerings while standing in water.
They needed the warning because the
river’s water was, in fact, barely visible, blanketed with a toxic foam of
industrial waste and sewage. If you didn’t know better, you could mistake it
for the morning after a night of heavy snowfall.
Many worshipers in northern India
celebrate the festival at the Yamuna River,
a religiously significant tributary of the Ganges that runs through the capital
city of New Delhi.
Every year, the festival season of
November brings unwelcome reminders of how devastatingly
polluted the water and air around the city remain. The Yamuna, one of
the main sources of water for Delhi, is so overwhelmed by waste in the 13-mile
stretch that cuts through the city that it is highly unsafe for bathing
or irrigation.
But the Yamuna’s decades-old
problem of pollution gained new prominence in embarrassing fashion this week
when the local administration in Delhi tried to scrape together a last minute
cleanup at the festival site. It sent out boats to try to sweep away the foam,
laid down bamboo barricades to stop it from spreading and even deployed workers
with hoses to sprinkle the river with clean water.
“What are you doing?” a reporter
asked a Delhi government worker in a video.
“I am spraying water to kill the
foam,” he said.
Yet, none of these shambolic
efforts seemed to dent the spirits of the worshipers as they thronged by the
thousands to the riverbank — not the foam below, the smog above or the Delhi
government’s warnings that the coronavirus that wreaked
havoc in the city earlier this year was still a threat.
Their explanation: What’s a little
foam in the face of faith?
The families arrived in taxis,
traditional sugar cane offerings jutting out the windows, and they got there
packed in the backs of tractor wagons and large trucks. They came in bright
saris and in shiny suits. Many walked barefoot, and some carried their own
sound systems — with a car battery for power.
“I am not worried,” said Kiran
Devi, who had not eaten in three days and would break her fast only when the
festival ended with the final prayer. “Once I go in the water, it will be
fine.”
Some cleared the foam with their
hands, pushing it away to create a little space for their prayers. Others used
sticks. The foul odors were inescapable.
Ms. Devi arrived for sunset on
Wednesday, and her extended family of 10 would spend the night by the riverbank
to wait for the sunrise worship that is the festival’s culminating event. The
women, who made up the majority of those fasting, arranged the baskets of
offerings with bananas, coconuts and radishes, and filled the diya lights, small clay lamps, with ghee before lighting
them. The men mostly lingered and chatted.
Her brother-in-law, Sonu Prasad,
36, who sells buttons, said he knows what contributes to the pollution of the
river: “When I shower, it goes into a small canal, then a big canal, then it
goes into the river,” he said.
“It’s a sewer,” Ms. Devi’s husband
and Sonu’s older brother, Ravi Shankar Gupta, said. “But the sun deity says:
‘Even if you stand in a gutter and make an offering, I will protect you for the
rest of the year.’”
“It would be great if they improve
it, but even if they don’t, what can we do?” Mr. Gupta added, pointing to the
infighting over the pollution between the states that the river flows through.
“We will still live, and enjoy life.”
The Yamuna forms the boundary
between Delhi and the state of Uttar Pradesh, a circumstance that has
complicated the already tortured process of cleaning it up. Hundreds of
millions of dollars have been spent in recent decades, to little effect. Less
than half of the roughly 16 billion gallons of daily sewage in India’s urban
centers is treated, according to government figures, and much of the rest
pollutes the country’s rivers.
New Delhi, overwhelmed by a growing
population, treats about two-thirds of its sewage. But hundreds of millions of
gallons are still dumped into the Yamuna untreated, along with untreated
industrial waste, in its slog through the city.
Delhi gets a good portion of its
drinking water from the Yamuna, which enters the city limits relatively clean. After
that, the river is pummeled with wastes.
“We extract everything and in
return we give back the sewage only,” said Sushmita Sengupta, a geologist and
senior program manager at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
One of the reasons the authorities
for decades have failed to address the problem of river pollution is
bureaucratic red tape and “the multiplicity of agencies” involved, said Avinash
Mishra, a top adviser on water and land resources to the government of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi.
“It’s become a volleyball,” Mr.
Mishra said.
He warned that the country’s water
woes, if not tackled with urgency, could have dire ramifications for an
already slowing
economy.
“The moment the water is
contaminated, there is water shortage, which impacts human working days,” he
said. “It generates so many waterborne diseases that it will impact your
services, your industries, urbanization and the living standards of your
population.”
Undeterred by such considerations,
the worshipers thronged to the river for the sunset on Wednesdaymany of them
staying the night on the riverbank to catch the sunrise the next morning.
“In society, when someone falls
low, when someone grows poor, they stop respecting that person,” said Premchand
Jha, who works as a driver. “Here, we give as much respect to the setting sun
as we do to the rising sun.”
The fasting women stood in the water,
in meditation. In front of them was foam and more foam, the orange melancholy
of the setting sun reflected on the brief slice of water that appeared between
the puffy white clouds.
Around them the carnival commotion
continued all night, and picked up again as dawn approached.
Children threw ear-piercing
firecrackers at one another’s feet. Teenagers streamed the festivities live on
their Facebook pages. Others posed for selfies, picking up the foam and posing
as if it was a puff of snow. There were tattoo artists and ice cream sellers
and balloon sellers. And of course, small chai stands.
“There is no sugar in this,
brother, what kind of chai is this?” one young man said, pushing his cup
through the crowd to the tea seller. The chai-man pinched some sugar, and
dropped it in the cup.
Ms. Devi’s family had come prepared
with a rug, a couple sleeping bags and blankets for the children. Her husband,
Mr. Gupta, explained that they were staying the night because they wanted to
reach the water’s edge to see the sunrise before things got crowded.
“Whoever comes earlier will get a
little more from the sun god,” Mr. Gupta said. “A little blessing, and maybe a
little property.”
As the sunrise neared, the fasting
women entered the water and remained knee deep in their final meditation. But
there would be no dramatic climax — the sun simply wasn’t visible through the
Delhi smog.
“We can’t shine extra light on the
sun, we have ruined that too,” Mr. Jha, the driver, said. “But I checked
online. The sunrise is between 6:30 and 6:40. When we see the first glimmer of
redness there, then the sun has risen.”
