A GRIM FORECAST
Despite the long history of the river's desecration, what has happened to date may pale beside what awaits this region if current practices continue. The population of the basin is projected to reach almost a billion people in the next generation - more than the population of the entire world at the beginning of the 19th century. This would mean 2.5 billion liters of sewage, or double today's quantity, discharged into the river each day by the year 2020. Even more ominous are the forecasts for industrial pollution. According to a report in the Economic Times, a Bombay-based daily, industrial discharge into the Ganges is growing at the rate of 8 percent per year. At this rate, by 2020, nearly 2 billion liters of industrial effluents, as well, would enter the river every day - and close to 4 billion by the year 2030.
In any life process, whether that of an individual organism or a large ecosystem, gradually increasing stress does not result simply in gradually increasing impairment; at some point the whole process collapses - as is now happening in the Ganges. If this continues much longer, the Ganges will become incapable of serving its traditional waste-removal function, or of providing usable water for industries or homes. Already, 40 million workdays and millions of rupees in health services are lost each year due to diseases the river carries. With a collapse of basic freshwater services, those losses could explode. Moreover, among the hundreds of rivers and other fresh water bodies of India and South Asia, the abuse of the Ganges is not an isolated case. Nearly 70 percent of India's available water is polluted. Waterborne diseases like typhoid and cholera are responsible for 80 percent of all health problems and one-third of all deaths in India and the rest of the developing world. Only 7 percent of India's 3,000 cities have any kind of sewage