This story appears in the August 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.India’s daunting challenge: There’s water everywhere, and nowhere A 2,400-mile trek across India reveals the allure of its sacred rivers—and a crisis that threatens a way of life.

1. Ashish sahu

2. MAGAZINEOUT
OFEDENWALK

3. A man bathes away sin in the Ganges—amid a swirl of marigold offerings, plastic trash, and fecal waste. The
river, sacred to Hindus and a vital resource to areas with large populations and little infrastructure, is one of
the most polluted on Earth.

4. The Guru Nanak Dev coal-burning power plant in Bathinda, Punjab, shut down in 2017 after 43 years. It
helped power the state’s mammoth irrigation needs, but it also blanketed Bathinda with coal ash, causing
nasal, eye, and respiratory complaints and damage to local ecosystems.

5. Women wash laundry and collect water on Majuli Island, in the Brahmaputra River, in Assam. A large river
island, at one time more than 300 square miles in area, Majuli formed at the turn of the 17th century when
an earthquake and flooding rerouted the river. With climate change affecting India’s monsoons and causing
rapid erosion of Majuli’s shores, the island has shrunk to less than 200 square miles today.

6. CHRISTINE FELLENZ, NGM STAFF
SOURCES: LANDSCAN; WHYMAP GWV, BGR &
UNESCO 2015

7. Heavy machinery is used to scoop sand from the Son riverbed in Bihar. Although
this operation may be legal, sand mining is often done illegally under cover of
darkness. Sand supplies India’s booming construction industry, but excessive
mining disrupts rivers and destroys habitats of endangered species such as river
dolphins and crocodile-like gharials.

8. The Kumbh Mela, a major Hindu festival, brings pilgrims to one of four river sites
in India every three years. In 2019 crowds gathered in Prayagraj (Allahabad), at
the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. Day and night, tens of
thousands thronged the temporary bridges spanning the Ganges.