India: dirty Ganges

A multi-million dollar scheme launched seventeen years ago by the Indian government to clean up the River Ganges has been described by a prominent Indian environmentalist as a major fiasco.

The environmentalist, M C Mehta, said the government had failed to involve the masses and as a result the project had totally collapsed.

As an example, he said, the two-thousand-year-old holy city of Varanasi had become a stink-hole, with the river turned into a sludge of faecal matter.

Despite this, an average of about eighty-thousand people bathed in the river daily.

Mr Mehta has campaigned against industrial polluton in Delhi and near the Taj Mahal and last year wasawarded the prestigious Magasasay Award for his work.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service