A river gasps for life

"What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else," Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Hal Boule once said. This statement, however, no longer holds true as some of the world’s greatest rivers, including the Ganga, are no longer assured of reaching the sea unhindered, says the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Human greed, expanding population and climate change have together ensured that.

In the years to come the northern plains, heavily dependent on the Ganga, are likely to face severe water scarcity. Together with the onslaught of industrial and sewage pollutants, the river’s fate stands more or less sealed.

"Among the categories dead, dying and threatened, I would put the Ganga in the dying category," says WWF Programme Director Sejal Worah.

The other heavyweight to join in the list from the Indian subcontinent is the mighty Indus. The Indus, too, has been the victim of climate change, water extraction and infrastructure development. "In all, poor planning and inadequate protection of natural means have ensured that the world population can no longer assume that water is going to flow forever," WWF says, adding that the world’s water suppliers—rivers-on-every-continent are dying, threatening severe water shortage in the future.

The other rivers of the world are at the mercy of over-extraction, climate change, pollution, dams and over-fishing are the Yangtze, the Mekong-Lancang, the Salween-Nu, the Danube, the La Plata, the Rio Grande, the Nile and the Murray-Darling. The bottomline, therefore, is that rivers are no longer assured of reaching the sea unhindered.

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