On the Ganges

by George Black

  Hafizurrahman never raised his voice, but bitterness doesn’t have to be loud. “‘Close the tanneries yourselves, or we’ll raid you and shut you down,’ they said. So we came to an agreement. They gave us the dates, and we stopped work. But it didn’t make any difference. During the night, one o’clock, two o’clock, they’d come in with the press, jump over the walls, take photographs, defame us! Even though we had shut down!”

  We went back out into the yard, where workers were loading up a wooden-wheeled horse cart with piles of rawhide. A white goat with a black head wandered over, and Hafizurrahman stopped to scratch it behind the ear, composing himself.

  * * *

  A dozen miles or so from Kanpur, the town of Unnao has a much smaller cluster of about a dozen tanneries. It’s hard for a tannery to be spotless, but Kings International, a manufacturer of high-end saddlery and a small quantity of bags and belts for the luxury export market, came close. Bougainvillea spilled over the whitewashed outer walls. A gardener was snipping away at the topiary bushes, near a sign that said,

  REAL TIME EFFLUENT QUALITY MONITORING STATION

  WE FIGHT POLLUTION AND SAFEGUARD THE ENVIRONMENT

  The spacious reception area had black leather sofas, and bright tropical fish were darting back and forth in an aquarium. A display case of leather handbags looked ready for tags from Gucci and Hermès and Givenchy. There were framed mission statements and vision statements and no smoking signs and trade magazines to read while I waited to see the owner of the tannery, Taj Alam, who was also the president of the Uttar Pradesh Leather Industries Association.

  He appeared after a few minutes, full of apologies for keeping me waiting. Late forties perhaps, coal-black hair, snow-white beard, beaming smile, and fluent English. He ushered me into his air-conditioned office and plunked himself down in a $500 executive chair behind a glass-topped desk. There was an ornate grandfather clock in one corner and shelves of testimonial plaques, industry awards, and equestrian-themed knickknacks. Yet for all the differences in style, décor, and no doubt net worth, listening to him was like listening to Hafizurrahman in stereo.

  “Okay, we are a religious minority,” he said. “We cannot say whether you have to bury your dead, or throw your dead away, or burn them in a crematorium, or burn them on the banks of the river Ganges. On that we cannot speak. But the mela, yes. They close the tanning sector for a month. You cannot process leather, you cannot make shoes, we lose billions of rupees, and how much can you store for a rainy day? But you have ten million people shitting in the river, urinating there, throwing stuff on the ghats. And that in itself is a tremendous pollution thing!”

  A peon brought in a tray of chai and biscuits and small bottles of water.

  “Do you know how many other industrial facilities there are in Kanpur?” Alam asked.

  I confessed that I didn’t.

  “Thirty thousand,” he said. “And will you please tell me, have they imposed any treatment-plant order on any other industry?”

  “So why do you think they’ve singled you out?” I asked, though the answer seemed obvious enough: tanning leather was one of the filthiest industries in the world.

  He paused, choosing his words with care. “The logic is simple,” he said. “Because the tanning sector is 99.99 percent Muslim.”

  * * *

  Alam walked me downstairs to a large, airy workroom where men were assembling saddles and punching holes for grommets in leather belts. Outside, we walked over to the effluent monitoring station. “It keeps you on your toes, you know exactly what you’re doing,” he said. “I do my primary treatment here. Then it goes to the central treatment plant. But then what happens? That water goes into the same nullah as the raw sewage, because there is no sewage treatment plant in Unnao! And that is the government’s responsibility. So it all goes into the Ganga. Whatever we have done here is undone. So why bother to do it?

  “People are made only to see our dark side. They are wearing the shoes, they are wearing the belts, the ladies are carrying the handbags and wearing the gloves. But what do they think would happen if we were not tanning the hides? If there’s a dead body on the road, it’s the eagle or the vulture that deals with it, instead of the body decaying. Hundreds of millions of Indians eat meat. And how the hell can you stop a person eating his staple food? If they close down the tanneries, the slaughtering will continue, but the skins will just be thrown on the ground or into the nullahs. You see, we are the ones who prevent diseases and epidemics! We are like the eagle or the vulture; we are the scavengers.”

  MOTHERS AND CHILDREN

  Rakesh Jaiswal was born in Mirzapur, a carpet-making town on the Ganges between Allahabad and Varanasi, but he had devoted most of his adult life to the thankless task of ministering to the health of the river in Kanpur. He was in his late fifties now, with thick gray hair, a courtly manner, and weary eyes. “I have seen Hindus go into a sewage drain and sprinkle water on their foreheads,” he said. “I have seen them dipping bodies into raw sewage and tannery effluent. I have seen Hindus who are very interested in the rituals of Ma Ganga. I haven’t seen any who are very interested in cleaning it.”

  In 1993, he decided to change that by founding a small organization that he called Eco Friends. One of the first things he did was to go out and retrieve dead bodies from the river. Usually they were either the indigent, those whose families couldn’t afford the wood for a cremation, or unidentified and unclaimed corpses dumped by the police. “We started by cleaning a ten-kilometer stretch of the river,” he said. “We found a hundred and eighty bodies and got them properly buried. After that, we went out twice or thrice each year. Every time we found at least a hundred bodies in various stages of decay.”

  The newspapers took an interest; the government didn’t.

  The Manchester of the East was in rapid decline at the time, to the greater detriment of the river. The government had taken over most of the city’s celebrated textile mills, which were plagued by corruption, incompetent management, labor conflicts, and sloppy maintenance. In 1992, the industry was ordered to halt all production. There were mass layoffs. As the mills decayed, the tanneries grew to become the engine of Kanpur’s economy, sopping up many of the surplus workers. The central treatment plant, the object of Hafizurrahman’s bitter scorn, was opened in 1994 as part of the government’s so-called Ganga Action Plan to clean up the worst sources of pollution. Nominally, the plant could handle the effluent from 175 tanneries—less than half the size it would eventually need to be, and nominally being the operative word. The idea was to treat the waste, dilute it with treated sewage, and use the mixture to irrigate nearby villages. There was not only more tannery waste than before, it was also nastier. Old-fashioned vegetable tanning was falling out of favor; chromium salts gave a more desirable product.

  Jaiswal, who by this time had acquired a Ph.D., turned to the tools of law and science. In 1998, he filed a lawsuit with the High Court in Allahabad. One hundred and twenty-seven tanneries were ordered to close until they installed their own primary treatment plants. Did they actually operate them? Well, that was a different matter. That cost money.

  Over the next three years, he took his team out to the villages that were using the irrigation water from the treatment plant. They took samples of milk and other farm products and sent them to the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur for analysis. They found concentrations of chrome a hundred times higher than the safe level set by the government. Jaiswal’s reputation spread. The Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation opened their checkbooks. There were projects for the World Bank and the World Health Organization. He hung a testimonial on the wall of his office that said, “This is to certify that Rakesh Jaiswal, Ph.D. has been selected as one of 50 Unsung Heroes of Compassion,” stamped with the gold seal of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

  * * *

  We spent a hot, dreary afternoon in Jajmau. On the way to the treatment plant, we stopped at a cleared plot of land on a gentle slope less tha
n a quarter mile from the river. “Look at how low it is,” he said. “You could walk across. It’s only knee-deep in places. At Haridwar, the river is bone dry. All the water goes into the Upper Ganga Canal. Then the Middle Ganga Canal, the Lower Ganga Canal. By the time the river reaches Kanpur, it’s debatable whether there is even a single drop of Himalayan water.”

  The detritus of the industry was heaped up in piles next to an electrical substation that was painted yellow. Some were offcuts of wet blue, which gave off a faint chemical odor. Others were scraps of hide with the hair and shreds of flesh and rancid fat still attached. Dogs were sniffing at them, and they were surrounded by buzzing clouds of flies. A laborer was hacking away at some of this brown muck with a four-tined pitchfork. Once it was ground up, it would be sold to make chicken feed and glue. “This fellow will earn maybe one hundred and fifty rupees a day,” Jaiswal said. That was less than two and a half dollars.

  At the treatment plant, an affable engineer gave us a tour of a couple of acres of malodorous concrete structures. There were screen and grit channels, equalization tanks, mixing tanks, aeration tanks where white cattle egrets perched on the surrounding guardrail and the waste frothed and foamed like a gigantic brown milkshake. There were collection wells, pumping stations, UASB reacters. That stood for upflow anaerobic sludge blanket, the engineer explained helpfully.

  He reeled off some facts and figures. Each day, the plant mixed twenty-seven million liters of treated sewage with nine million of treated tannery waste, a three-to-one ratio.

  “But that doesn’t account for all the waste from the tanneries, does it?” I asked.

  “No, they actually generate more than thirty million liters a day,” he said.

  “Probably more like fifty,” Jaiswal interjected. “But the truth is, no one really knows.”

  In other words, as much as four-fifths of the waste would end up in those blue-black drainage channels, which carried it straight into the sacred river. The same applied to Kanpur’s sewage; only 20 percent of that was treated.

  “But the plant’s been here for more than twenty years,” I said. “Why was it never upgraded?”

  The engineer looked helpless. “These things take a lot of time.”

  “And money,” Jaiswal said.

  * * *

  “How much of the money is pocketed no one knows, no one can prove,” he said as we drove away, passing a gang of laborers who were burying sludge from the treatment plant in a landfill and covering it with crushed rock. “Corruption is everywhere. It is known to everybody, but nobody talks about it. In every public service department like water or electricity or sewers, most of the work is executed by contractors who have to pay off the authorities. It’s almost legal. If it’s only 30 or 40 percent, it’s not corruption. It’s more like a right. Sometimes all the money is pocketed, 100 percent, and the work takes place only on paper.”

  We drove on for two or three miles to the outskirts of the city to see the irrigation canal. It ran along an elevated berm above a dusty field where workers had laid out squares of hide to dry in the blazing sun. I clambered up over the crumbling stonework onto a precarious, unguarded walkway a few inches wide. The cocktail of sewage and tannery waste came gushing out of two large rusty outflow pipes. It made its way down the canal at a fair clip. It was greenish-brown and topped with a rippling layer of black-flecked foam two feet deep. It smelled terrible.

  After Jaiswal presented his study of chromium contamination, the government had installed another small plant where a portion of the spent chrome was recovered and recycled. I asked him if this had led to any improvement in the water quality. He pursed his lips and said, “No, it is just the same.”

  Back at his office, a sad-eyed middle-aged man served us tea. We sat quietly under the plaque from the Dalai Lama, an awkward silence. Finally, I asked Jaiswal what he had in mind to do next.

  He sighed. “I don’t know. The future is very bleak. Once I had a staff of ten. Now it’s just Jitendra and me. I seem to have resigned and lost hope.”

  What about the new government, which was promising to clean up the river where all its predecessors had failed?

  “Government is talking and talking and talking,” he said at last. “Cow is our mother. Ganga is our mother. We will save our mother. But we will not take care of the children of the tanneries. We’ll let them be killed.”

  PRESS ONE FOR MANGOES

  Yet here and there across the endless dusty hinterland there were flickers of optimism, often signaled by the trill of cell phones. If you’d asked most Indians for a symbol of the bad old days of rigid state control of the economy and stultifying bureaucracy, they’d probably have chosen the experience of getting a telephone. You could wait years for a landline, and the only way to speed things up was who you knew and how much you were prepared to slip them in the plain brown envelope. Now there were more cell phones than people in the cities, and the service providers, offering the cheapest rates in the world, had descended on the unconnected rural areas. Uttar Pradesh, with two hundred million people—as many as Brazil, but compacted into 3 percent of the land area—was a prime target. In more and more villages, the constant soundtrack was the chirp of the Nokia ringtone.

  These were not people who could afford the bells and whistles of an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy endorsed by Bollywood celebrities. “We want to be the Southwest Airlines of the mobile industry,” said one senior executive I met, whose company was locked in a cutthroat struggle for the rural market with half a dozen others. “We have thirty-five million subscribers, but that’s not much. In India, everything has to have at least seven zeros.” (I heard later that his company had folded, killed off by its larger competitors.)

  For women especially, going mobile could mean a new life, though the freedom it gave them came with the risk of a ferocious backlash. In one village in Uttar Pradesh, the local elected council, the panchayat, had recently banned the use of phones by unmarried girls. Teenage boys were allowed to make calls, but only under adult supervision. The elders were clearly unnerved by the threat of flirtation, romance, violation of the rules of home, family, and arranged marriage. This was not a trivial matter. I’d never associated the idea of honor killings with Hinduism, but it turned out that there were three or four a week in India and that two-thirds of them were in UP. In the month leading up to the panchayat’s edict, eight young people from the surrounding district had been killed after eloping; three girls were beheaded by male relatives.

  The Achilles’ heel of the mobile phone was the problem of keeping it charged, and most of the prospective buyers in the target market didn’t have reliable access to electricity. Often the best you could hope for was to hook up to your tractor battery—but that assumed you were rich enough to own a tractor in the first place. True, the fields were crisscrossed by power lines and transmission towers. The question was whether the juice flowed through them for more than a few hours a day and at the right time; as often as not, it would happen only when you were fast asleep. One day I strolled through a village where the streets were lined with electricity poles and the houses had meters mounted on the walls. But then I noticed that there were no wires attached to the poles and that the meters were shrouded in cobwebs. Nonetheless, some bureaucrat in Lucknow or Delhi had doubtless added the place to his Potemkin quota of “newly electrified villages.”

  This was one reason photovoltaic panels had begun to pop up here and there on the unlikeliest of rooftops, and kids were poring over their schoolbooks in the evening by the glow of a solar lantern. Some young women had put two and two together and were making a little pocket money on the side. One morning I met a sweet-faced twenty-four-year-old named Vidyawati, who was sitting in the doorway of her house next to a shelf of bright yellow solar lanterns, waiting for customers. In a nearby storeroom, wedged in between a barrel of cooking oil and a sack of animal feed, there was a truck-size battery that drew power from the panels on the roof. Vidyawati thought of herself as an entrepren
eur—a word that had become a kind of magical incantation in India. “I rent out the lanterns overnight for two rupees,” she said. “Yesterday I rented out thirty-two of them.” For charging a neighbor’s cell phone, she got five rupees. In a good week, she might clear five hundred rupees, about eight dollars, which was enough to afford a few small treats like jewelry and clothes. I wondered if that accounted for the elegant sari she was wearing, which was black and silver, with Rajasthani-style mirrored embroidery.

  Vidyawati—whose name, I discovered, meant “learned”—was the first member of her family to go to school. Now she was studying English literature, taking an auto-rickshaw each day to the college in a nearby town. “You have to know English to get ahead in India these days,” she said. Her ambition was to join the UP police.

  I asked her what kind of literature she liked best. She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled. “Love stories,” she said.

  * * *

  Just outside Allahabad, I stopped in a desolate hamlet in the township of Phulpur, Jawaharlal Nehru’s first parliamentary constituency. A man came running up to me in the street shouting, “Gulf! Gulf!” He waved a business card in my face. It was for a dry cleaning store in Abu Dhabi. He’d had it laminated. “Job!” he grinned. “Job!” He was off there on a short-term contract, and he’d be back in May or June in time to help out with the pre-monsoon harvest.

  I walked over to the village hall to talk to some farmers who had bought special “green SIM cards” from another cell phone company, which took some of the guesswork out of their decisions about planting, harvesting, and marketing in a time of ever-hotter summers and ever more unpredictable monsoons. The card gave them five text messages a day, starting at 7:00 A.M.: weather reports, news alerts, helpful tips, spot prices for wheat and rice. If they found an unfamiliar pest or fungus in their crop, they could send a photograph to an expert for advice or call a help line for one rupee a minute.