Indian Environmental Activist G D Agarwal passes away fasting for saving Ganga

Vishwanath Srikantaiah

Prof GD Agarwal – Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand…may Ganga give your soul eternal rest and may we give you the Ganga you so cherished and dreamt of.

It was off Tulsi ghat in Benaras in 2010 , on the banks of the holy Ganga . A small green coloured sign board on a room above the steps of the ghats, spoke about an environmental monitoring project of the river. I had just stepped into and seen the beautiful Lolark well , had seen milk men go off to sell milk in their large canisters tied to a cycle after finishing wrestling practice in an akhara nearby and now was curious to see what was happening in this place.

Two gentlemen were quietly conversing with each other . One was the Mahant of the Sankat Mochan trust and temple, Shri Veerbhadra Mishra – a Prof. of Hydraulic Engineering and later head of Civil Engineering Department in the IIT-BHU and the other was Prof. G.D. Agarwal – Head of the Civil Engineering Department IIT-Kanpur ,later on Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand.

Obviously I had interrupted a serious discussion and so after hurried greetings I left the room to walk the Ganga again.

Here were two remarkable characters, Civil Engineers, Environmental Engineers people who knew the science of water and rivers well, who were exacting taskmasters , who prepared a legion of quality engineers. Two people who loved the river Ganga immensely and personally. Two people who were part of religious orders which simply could not stand the desecration of the river and sought salvation for a river that provides salvation. The strength of the fight must have come from faith itself.

It is the same discipline of Civil Engineering ironically and the Civil Engineers trained by these very Professors perhaps , who built the dams and barrages, the canals and anicuts , the hydro-power plants and the dysfunctional sewage treatment plants , that stopped the flow of waters in the ganga and polluted it . Bhasmasura unleashed. 

Prof.G.D.Agarwal studied in what is now IIT-Roorkee , India’s and indeed Asia’s oldest technical institute, the first Engineering college of the British empire. Ironically the institute itself was set up to further the cause of canal building in India and to train the engineers for that purpose.

The upper Ganga canal and the upper Yamuna canal , fertilizing the doab between the Ganga and the Yamuna, were the first canal projects of scale in India eventually leaving India as the country with the largest canal network in the world. The diversion of the waters of the Ganga and the Yamuna had begun in the 1840’s itself. Prosperity followed for some farmers and sugarcane was established as a crop. The death knell of the Ganga had sounded .

As I walked , I saw the Mahant escorted to the banks of the river by two young followers as he had difficulty walking . He then went in to the river and had a dip , a daily practice I was told. G.D. was not with him . Close by a large sewage pipe directly discharged black waters into the river.

These martyrs of a lost cause, fighting battles with science and religious sentiment together , against an obdurate and entrenched bureaucracy, politicians with double speak, a people resigned and full of indifference and apathy, dreaming of a clean and free flowing river, was the stuff of legend.

Inspiring students , ordinary people and monks alike they have left an indelible mark on the body politic and discourse of saving a river which is the soul of India. Alas the river demands sacrifices of an extraordinary nature, of life itself and yet is believed to provide redemption to the souls who pass away near it or in its waters.

In the Kuznets curve of economic and environmental development and degradation , the salvation of the river will definitely come , in decades if not years. That is the capitalist hope. The generation then will hopefully remember these giants who gave their very lives for the river.

Old man river,
that old man river,
he must know something 
he just say nothing
he just keep rolling along

Bistar hi apar
praja dono paar
kare hahakaar
nishabda sada 
o ganga behti ho kyun

oh ganga ki dhar, nirbal jan ko, 

sabalsangrami, samagrogrami, banati nahi ho kyun?

Mahant Veerbhadra Mishra passed away in March 2013

Prof. G.D.Agarwal – Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand…may Ganga give your soul eternal rest and may we give you the Ganga you so cherished and dreamt of.