Fran Peavey | November, 2002

Q: Dear Fran, I'm 24 years old. Do you think Ganga will be cleaned during my lifetime? (I hope to live a long time.) Thanking you, Mayank

	Fran Peavey (center) is a founding member of the Campaign for a Clean Ganga

A: It is sometimes said that Ganga will be clean only when the bureaucracy of India is cleaned, with policies as transparent as water. If that is true, then we may have some time to wait.

We may not have to wait that long. Once construction and on the interceptor and ponds gets underway in Varanasi, we will be well on our way toward a cleaner Ganga.

Building the Varanasi installation will happen when state and national bodies decide to honour the 74th amendment to the Indian Constitution that grants environmental policies to cities. They should assist the Varanasi Municipal Corporation in its formidable task of building the infrastructure for moving sewage by the force of gravity rather than electric pumps that fail every time the power supply fails.

All over India citizens are becoming aware that they must do something in order to have a clean goddess and a healthy body. I just read today that the Eco-friends environmental group in Kanpur, assisted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has performed a study of groundwater and found shocking contaminants. "The presence of Arsenic, Cadmium, Mercury, Nickel and Chrome VI, not known to be present till now in the tannery waste streams, has been detected at an alarmingly high level in underground water - post-treated sewage irrigation water being supplied to the farmers in the vicinity of Jajmau, Kanpur and Post Treated tannery effluents...at Unnao."

I wish you a long life, Mayank and I pray for cleaning Ganga and other sources of water soon. The vitality of the Indian nation is at stake.

Fran Peavey

Fran Peavey is one of the founding members of Sankat Mochan Foundation, which leads the Campaign for a Clean Ganga. She is also President of Friends of the Ganges USA.