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Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/the-water-purifier-comes-built-in-8644.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Water Purifier Comes Built-In | Im4change.org
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The Water Purifier Comes Built-In

-Outlook

 

The secret behind the Ganga’s ability to self-rejuvenate its waters continues to elude discovery

In 2009, when C.S. Nautiyal, now the director of Lucknow’s National Botanical Research Institute, spiked a fresh Ganga water sample with an infectious strain of Escherichia coli to test the Ganga’s reported self-healing qualities, he found that the bacteria lasted no longer than three days. He repeated the experiment with a 16-year-old sample of Ganga water—the strain didn’t survive for more than 15 days. Is there something exceptional about the holy river’s water? Such claims are nothing new. In 1896, British bacteriologist Ernest Hankin reported the water’s ability to kill bacteria responsible for cholera. Because of its ability to stay fresh for months, the British always carried water from the Ganga on their ships back to England. And millions of Indians still swear by the water’s mysterious ability to stay clean in their bottles and not smell foul.

There are sceptics, including those who conflate such claims with Hindutva propaganda, but this hasn’t deterred people from researching the water. There is no incontrovertible explanation yet, though many hypotheses have been offered. Some say the river supports a large and active population of macrophages—parasites that multiply exponentially by attacking other bacteria—while others argue that it has certain beneficial radioactive ions brought down from the Himalayas that help purify the water. Another school attributes this trait to the vegetation debris that is washed along in the river’s flow. There is also an argument that high levels of dissolved oxygen in Ganga water helps it decompose organic matter, preventing them from putrefying.

However, there is evidence that this self-cleansing is being threatened by dams in the river’s upper reaches. A new study by the People’s Science Institute (PSI) in Dehradun has found that this trait reduces substantially and cumulatively as the water passes through dams. “From the Gangnani upstream of the now-abandoned Loharinag Pala dam to further downstream after Tehri, this capacity is reduced by as much as 50 per cent,” says PSI’s Ravi Chopra. A water sample from the Bhagirathi (one of the Ganga’s source rivers) at Gangnani removed twice as much suspended solids in about an hour, as compared to the same amount of water collected from the Bhagirathi downstream of the Maneri Bhali I, II and Tehri dams. The bacteria-killing (collicidal) properties of the water was also reduced downstream. The most likely reason for this is that the substances responsible for the self-purifying quality settle down in the dams’ reservoirs, where the Bhagirathi’s flow is stalled and beyond which its unique sediments are carried in lesser quantities. PSI also reported a similar self-cleansing property from the Tons, another Himalayan river, but Chopra argues that it isn’t on the same scale as the Ganga’s.

In another study, published in December 2010 in Current Science, a journal by the IISC in Bangalore, researcher Piyush Pandey found no trace of the lethal E Coli O157: H7 in Uttarakhand’s stretch of the Ganga—its presence has been reported further downstream. In Nautiyal’s research, published in Current Microbiology, the bacteria survived longer in filtered and boiled Ganga water, suggesting that beneficial anti-microbial agents were eliminated by boiling and filtration. He argues that the Ganga’s water, instead of being politicised, should be exploited and researched to “usher in a second golden age of antibiotic discovery”. But with the dams that hinder the Ganga’s free flow, how long will this mysterious factor be around?