The river roads of India

During 2018 and 2019, I walked for 17 months across northern India as part of the  Out of Eden Walk  project, a multiyear foot journey that is following the pathways of the first ancient humans who discovered the world in the Stone Age.

India was the largest nation I've traversed so far. And like no other country, it is shaped physically, culturally, and spiritually by its colossal river systems.

Three major waterways drain the glaciers of India’s Himalayan north and loop erratically southward over vast sedimentary river plains, sustaining the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. Walking continuously for more than 2,400 miles (4,000 kilometers) west to east—from the border of Pakistan to the frontier of Myanmar—I cut across the sprawling watersheds of each: the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, and their innumerable tributaries.

Such fabled rivers are the biographers of landscapes.

They collect in their currents the stories of the people and terrain along their sinuous routes. Walking India became the tale of three rivers, each highly distinctive, yet similar in one paradoxical way: All flow through one of the most desperate  water crises  in the world.

Above: A bend in the Ganges River near the sacred city of Varanasi echoes an alarming twist in India’s national future: a severe shortage of clean water that will affect its peoples’ health, economy and wellbeing for generations.

According to a  sobering national study  commissioned by the Indian government, 600 million citizens—almost half of India’s population—face either a critical shortage of drinking water or seriously contaminated water supplies.

The problem is neither abstract nor hypothetical.

As many as  200,000 people  die in India every year from lack of water access or pollution problems. Meanwhile, more than 100 million urbanites  in megacities  cities such as New Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad could drain the last drops of their groundwater as soon as the end of this year. And with every passing year as India's population grows, about  15 million  more people require water to live.

The effects of this  water crisis  ripple through virtually every facet of life in India, from immigration and food security to biodiversity and politics.

Crossing and re-crossing India’s sacred yet imperiled rivers, walking over modern highway bridges or balancing in rustic wood boats, I met and spoke with hundreds of farmers, scientists, nomads, and others. Their troubled relationship with water—life’s essence—propelled a torrent of anxieties and denial that will outlast any conflicts, pandemics or political turmoil in India.

Born in icy Tibet and roughly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) long,  the Indus  gives its name to India.

In Punjab state, its waters irrigate one of the  great grain baskets  of Asia—a success story of the  Green Revolution  that has helped make India a  net exporter  of food.

Yet walking the bustling farm roads through the Indus watershed, dodging endless columns of tractors hauling house-sized cargoes of wheat chaff, the sheer bounty of the Punjab obscured a darker environmental cost.

 Over-pumping of groundwater ,  heavy use of agricultural chemicals , and subdivision of family lands have made farming in the Indus watershed an increasingly marginal way of life.  Cancer hot spots  plague areas of heavy insecticide use. Bore wells are tainted  with fluoride . Debt-burdened farmers are  committing suicide . And as the water supply and field sizes have shrunk, young Punjabis have been voting with their feet: In the city of Faridcot, roughly a hundred English language schools prepared  millions of landless youths to emigrate  across the globe.

“There is no future in farming here,” said  Harpreet Singh , a middle-aged potato grower in the village of Dhindsa. “There aren’t enough subsidies to have a decent life. There is no insurance against losses. Mostly you just lose year by year. I’ve lost my investment for two years in a row. At best you break even.” Eventually, Singh hopes to send both his children to Canada.

From Punjab, I followed a tangle of weirs, pipes, and diversion channels south into the Thar Desert of Rajasthan.

There, amid gravel pans and yellow sands, I watched the last damp breaths of the Indus evaporate in the  Indira Gandhi Canal . The cracked and leaking causeway, built to green the desert, seemed like a forgotten artifact of the Bronze Age  Indus Valley Civilization , whose walled cities vanished some 3,700 years ago, victims possibly of drying rivers during a time of climate change.

Each river is a deity according to Hinduism.

But in India there is only one Mother River in the aquatic pantheon: the Ganges, or Ganga.

I walked east from Rajasthan, sleeping at temples and dusty farms, and inched into the Ganges’ huge drainage amid a cosmos of villages in the north-central states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

The city of  Varanasi  kneeled beside the riverbank in Uttar Pradesh. Tens of thousands of pilgrims crowded the city’s ghats, or stone-stepped ramps, washing away their sins or cremating their dead. To scatter one’s ashes in the Ganges at Varanasi guaranteed  moksha , liberation from the painful treadmill of reincarnation—the cycle of death and rebirth.

Earthly woes afflicted India’s most sacred river hundreds of miles downstream, in the city of Bhagalpur, in Bihar state—the site of  Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary .

About  6,000 endangered  South Asian river dolphins survive in the world. The  150 to 200 animals  protected within India’s only dolphin reserve are threatened by pollution, shipping noise, and entanglement in fishermen’s nets.  An even more serious threat  to the river’s ecology, though, is an ambitious plan to dredge and straighten the Ganges to accommodate large cargo vessels rumbling upstream from the Bay of Bengal. 

Converting the Ganges into an artificial shipping lane is just one feature of an unprecedented national plan to change the courses of 30 major rivers in India.

This controversial government  “river-linking”  project would re-plumb the course of entire riverways, diverting huge water flows via dams and canals to distant cities, thirsty industrial agricultural zones, or regions haunted by drought. Environmentalists decry the proposal. It would mark the death knell, many say, of river plains ecosystems already disrupted by industrial agriculture and poisoned by some of the worst pollution in the world. (In places, the Ganges’ water is  dangerous even for skin contact  because of  toxic levels of coliform bacteria .)

Poonam Devi, a market vendor in Bhagalpur, seemed braced for the worst. Already, a  dam downstream  from her community—one of  more than 5,000  built in India—had devastated the local fishing trade.

Above: Efforts to clean and rejuvenate the Ganges have been hampered for generations by manipulation of natural water flows, mostly for agriculture. Environmentalists say more than  900 dams  now strangle the river’s currents.

“Before we used to catch fish the length of your arm,”  Devi said . “Today, you are lucky to find anything longer than your finger. There’s no possibility of our fish coming back. We don’t even think about it anymore.”

The Brahmaputra is one of the  few “male” rivers  in India.

Legend holds that the river, the third longest in the world, with a muscular current that can flood  several miles wide  during monsoons, is a son of the god Brahma and a mortal woman.

I reached it after a year of walking in India. The inhabitants of its sandy banks were debating their “Indian-ness.”

The Brahmaputra bisects India’s lush northeast, the nation’s most ethnically diverse region. At least  220 different local ethnic groups  parse the river basin into tribal homelands. For decades, many  have battled for more autonomy . Activists accuse the government of pitting minority against minority.

“You cannot be from the outside and take our land,” said Hiteshwar Rabha, a community activist with the Rabha aboriginal group in Dudhnoi, a farming town near the Brahmaputra in Assam. “This land is for indigenous people.”

The “outsiders” were minority Muslims, many from neighboring Bangladesh. India’s Hindu nationalist government recently had forced a  citizenship test  on the  31 million  people in Assam. Tensions were at a boil. A few days' walk downstream from Dudhnoi, in a green tableau of betel nut palms and rice paddies, I met a Muslim farmer named Rupali Bibi. She hid in the bamboo thickets whenever police stopped by her village to serve her a “foreigner’s notice.”

“I am pure Indian,” Bibi insisted wearily. “I was born in this village and so was my father.”

Like an estimated four million other residents of Assam whose nationality was being questioned because of inadequate paperwork, Bibi faced a loss of citizenship, even incarceration.  Press reports  told of some villagers, bankrupted by legal fees, committing suicide after being deemed illegal immigrants.

Above: A crossroads of Asia, the populations of the northern Brahmaputra watershed reflect a history of invasions, trade, and migration. The eight states of northeastern India traversed by the great river are home to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

The Brahmaputra coursed through a maze of anger, fear and anxiety. I followed its liquid road eastward, trudging toward Myanmar.

The monsoons came. The river's floods were growing worse, people complained. Experts attributed the Brahmaptutra’s increasing wildness in part to  climate change : Pelting rains were chewing away at farms and fields.

The gigantic river itself moved with a startling silence. I stood on its banks and heard nothing.

Shining like an immense mirror, its powerful currents slid past humanity’s quarrels with seeming equanimity, like a deity waiting to have the last word.

Learn more about the Out of Eden Walk.