The Ganges River and Its Mysterious Factor X

Hindus have always believed that water from India's Ganges River has extraordinary powers. The Indian emperor Akbar called it the "water of immortality" and always traveled with a supply. The British East India Co. used only Ganges water on its ships during the three-month journey back to England, because it stayed "sweet and fresh."

Indians have always claimed it prevents diseases, but are the claims wives' tales or do they have scientific substance?

In the fourth installment of a six-part series ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), independent producer Julian Crandall Hollick searched for the "mysterious X factor" that gives Ganges water its mythical reputation.

He starts his investigation looking for the water's special properties at the river's source in the Himalayas. There, wild plants, radioactive rocks, and unusually cold, fast-running water combine to form the river. But since 1854, almost all of the Ganges' water has been siphoned off for irrigation as it leaves the Himalayas.

Hollick speaks with DS Bhargava, a retired professor of hydrology, who has spent a lifetime performing experiments up and down Ganges in the plains of India. In most rivers, Bhargava says, organic material usually exhausts a river's available oxygen and starts putrefying. But in the Ganges, an unknown substance, or "X factor" that Indians refer to as a "disinfectant," acts on organic materials and bacteria and kills them. Bhargava says that the Ganges' self-purifying quality leads to oxygen levels 25 times higher than any other river in the world.

Hollick's search for a scientific explanation for the X factor leads him to a spiritual leader at an ashram and a biologist in Kanpur. But his best answer for the Ganges' mysterious substance comes from Jay Ramachandran, a molecular biologist and entrepreneur in Bangalore.

In a short science lesson, Ramachandran explains why the Ganges doesn't spread disease among the millions of Indians who bathe in it. But he can't explain why the river alone has this extraordinary ability to retain oxygen.

excerpt from soundbyte;


Mr. D.S. BHARGAVA (Retired Hydrology Professor): Right from very ancient times people have been thinking that the Ganga have got some special properties, which other rivers do not have. One such special property is that when you store Ganga water in a close container, it doesn't putrefying.

     

HOLLICK: In other words, there's oxygen in the water, a lot of oxygen. So organic materials such as human waste or vegetable(ph) matter.

Mr. BHARGAVA: Then they were put in the Ganges, it is assimilated by the Ganges in a very short time compared to other rivers. I'm not saying that it immediately vanishes, but what I'm trying to say is that it's assimilated(ph) ability is about 15 to 25 times more than any other river. These are some of the very important special properties of the Ganga, which any of the river doesn't have.

HOLLICK: D.S. Bhargava spent a lifetime doing experiments up and down Ganga in the plains. Organic material usually exhausts the available oxygen. It outlives it and then starts putrefying, but not in Ganga.

Mr. BHARGAVA: There are some material present in the Ganga water, which prevent their survival.

HOLLICK: To prove this, Bhargava did a simple experiment.

Mr. BHARGAVA: We took two beakers. In one, Ganga water as it is, other one we boiled the Ganga water, then cooled it and then refilled it. In bottles because we record(ph) it as evidence.

HOLLICK: In the bottled water, the pathogens survived. In the un-boiled Ganga water, they died.

Mr. BHARGAVA: There is some material, which is acting up on the bacteria and not letting them survive. So this material will be there for have disinfecting.

HOLLICK: Bhargava have conducted the simple experiment at Varanasi and the plains.

Mr. BHARGAVA: So this shows that a material which is responsible for preventing the pathogens to survive, they're not coming from the Himalayas. This material is picked up on the bed. It is picked up on the bed.

HOLLICK: Bhargava claims that Yamana, which flows less than 100 miles away and will eventually merge with Ganga to Allahabad, simply doesn't have this property. What it is, he doesn't know. He's never been able to isolate it.

Mr. BHARGAVA: And it is a mysterious material; sometimes I call it a magic kind of material.

HOLLICK: And there's little matter of the river's extraordinary ability to retain oxygen, by Bhargava's calculations, 25 times higher than Yamana or any other river in the world.

The question is, why does it have such a high rate of oxygen?

Mr. BHARGAVA: Right. How does the river purify itself? And why does it have such as high rate of self-purification? That means a high rate of natural purification compared to any other river.

Water Facts and Figures

1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe water, roughly one-sixth of the world’s population. 2.4 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, about two-fifths of the world’s population. 2.2 million people in developing countries, most of them children, die every year from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene. Some 6,000 children die every day from diseases associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene – equivalent to 20 jumbo jets crashing every day. At any one time it is estimated that half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-borne diseases. 200 million people in the world are infected with schistosomiasis, of whom 20 million suffer severe consequences. The disease is still found in 74 countries of the world. Scientific studies show that a 77% reduction of incidence from the disease was achieved through well designed water and sanitation interventions. The average distance that women in Africa and Asia walk to collect water is 6 km. The weight of water that women in Africa and Asia carry on their heads is the equivalent of your airport luggage allowance (20kg). The average person in the developing world uses 10 litres of water a day. The average person in the United Kingdom uses 135 litres of water every day. One flush of your toilet uses as much water as the average person in the developing world uses for a whole day’s washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking. Comparative costs: In Europe $11 billion is spent each year on ice cream; in USA and Europe, $17 billion is spent on pet food; in Europe $105 billion is spent annually on alcoholic drinks, ten times the amount required to ensure water, sanitation and hygiene for all. In the past 10 years diarrhoea has killed more children than all the people lost to armed conflict since World War II. In China, India and Indonesia twice as many people are dying from diarrhoeal diseases as from HIV/AIDS. In 1998, 308,000 people died from war in Africa, but more than two million (six times as many) died of diarrhoeal disease. The population of the Kibeira slum in Nairobi, Kenya pay up to five times the price for a litre of water than the average American citizen. An estimated 25% of people in developing country cities use water vendors purchasing their water at significantly higher prices than piped water. Projections for 2025 indicate that the number of people living in water-stressed countries will increase to 3 billion – a six-fold increase. Today, 470 million people live in regions where severe shortages exist. The simple act of washing hands with soap and water can reduce diarrhoeal disease by one-third. Following the introduction of the Guatemalan Handwashing Initiative in 1998, there were 322,000 fewer cases of diarrhoea each year amongst the 1.5 million children under 5 nationwide in the country's lowest income groups. In Zambia, one in five children die before their fifth birthday. In contrast in the UK fewer than 1% of children die before they reach the age of five. A study in Karachi found that people living in areas without adequate sanitation who had no hygiene education spend six times more on medical treatments than those with sanitation facilities. Waterborne diseases (the consequence of a combination of lack of clean water supply and inadequate sanitation) cost the Indian economy 73 million working days a year. And a cholera outbreak in Peru in the early 1990s cost the economy US$1 billion in lost tourism and agricultural exports in just 10 weeks. Improved water quality reduces childhood diarrhoea by 15-20% BUT better hygiene through handwashing and safe food handling reduces it by 35% AND safe disposal of children’s faeces leads to a reduction of nearly 40%. At any time, 1.5 billion people suffer from parasitic worm infections stemming from human excreta and solid wastes in the environment. Intestinal worms can be controlled through better sanitation, hygiene and water. These parasites can lead to malnutrition, anaemia and retarded growth, depending upon the severity of the infection. It is estimated that pneumonia, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and malaria, which account for 20% of global disease burden, receive less than 1% of total public and private funds devoted to health research. Ecological sanitation is one option being practised in some communities in China, Mexico, Vietnam, etc. Excreta contains valuable nutrients. We produce 4.56 kg nitrogen, 0.55 kg phosphorous, and 1.28 kg potassium per person per year from faeces and urine. This is enough to produce wheat and maize for one person every year. One gramme of faeces can contains:10,000,000 Viruses, 1,000,000 bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, 100 parasite eggs. For more information, check http://www.wsscc.org/ Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council c/o WHO (CCW), 20 Avenue Appia, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Tel. +41 22 791 3544, fax +41 22 791 4847, e-mail: wsscc@who.ch Sources 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25: WaterAid 6, 25: WELL Technical Brief (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/) 16: Water for African Cities presentation, Stockholm Water Symposium, August 2001 12: Vision 21 – Water For People, March 2000, WSSCC 1, 2, 3, 4, 19: WHO/UNICEF/WSSCC Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report 17: WELL Planned Work studies 163 and 164. 20: Saadé et al (2001) The Story of a Successful Public-Private Partnership in Central America: Handwashing for Diarroheal Disease Prevention. BASICS, EHP, UNICEF, USAID and The World Bank 27: (Esrey and Andersson (1999), Environmental Sanitation from an Ecological Systems Approach. See:www.wsscc.org) 26: (10/90 Report on Health Research, 2000. Global Forum for Health Research) 18: (IHE Newsletter, January 2001) 28: (Advocating Sanitation - how, why and when? Sanitation Connection:http://www.sanicon.net/titles/topicintro.php3/topicId=1)

  

From Plant to Plate

Written by Nimailila Das

Rice is the second highest grown crop all over the world and is the highest consumed grain by humans. Anually over 700 million tons of rice is produced all over with Asia alone producing 92% of the total rice. India today produces about 130 million tons of rice per annum and its famous Basmati variety is considered the best rice variety world over. But little do people know that once upon a time India had a staggering 1,25,000 varieties of rice, with a new variety found in every 2-3 KM. Rice, which is the staple diet of India, was more than just food. Various locally grown varities of rice would have medicinal benifits, thus eliminating the need for any dietary suppliments. Unfortunatly due to commercial interests, most farmers in India today grow only a few varities, leading to mass extinction of this rare gift of nature. 


In an attempt to preserve these rare varieites, last season the GEV agriculture team set out into the interiors of Maharashtra, hunting for native seeds of rare rice. Their first destination was to Saguna bagh, an organic farm in Karjat. Mr Chandrasekhar Bhadsavle set up this farm to fulfil his father dream of inspiring people to turn back to farming profession and learn to live off the land. There the GEV team found a very special variety of rice - Govinda Bhoga! Popular in West Bengal, this traditional variety of rice comes with a very fragrant scent and with many medicinal properties. It is rich in vitamin B and its fiberous nature makes it healthy for the body. It also contains antioxidants that naturally keep the body healthy and helps fight diseases. Govinda Bhoga rice was used in many traditional Indian recipies, but it is popularly used in making Kheer or Sweet rice(see inset for recipe). Its natural purple color adds a royal look to the preperation.

Rice is best when comsumed unpolished, for it retains all the nutrients deposited in it naturally. When grown organically, the nutrient content increases and it keeps it free from any chemical residues. Organic rice is rich in fatty acids and are a natural health food for the body. So the next time you eat rice, eat organic eat wise.

Last Updated (Sunday, 20 February 2011 10:54)

New Medical Tourism Service in India

Hello.

Healthy in India

We are going to be starting a service which will facilitate "medical tourism" in India. Medical Tourism?

Since medical treatment in America and other "western" countries (at least the ones that do not provide universal health insurance) is outrageously expensive. We will facilitate foreigners' travels to and from India, arrange for their medical treatment and take them to various tourist or pilgrimage places throughout India at prices that will be a fraction of the medical care in the West.  We have connected with some of the best doctors in all of India from various fields of medicine. We also have a team of experienced "India travelers" who can guide you throughout the exciting land of India. Our web site will be up soon but if you are anxious to start right away you can email us at healthyinindia@gmail.com. We have also been posting interesting facts and news about health in India here at Healthy in India.

Turmeric, Madness and India

BBC News (UK) [1] on 13 Jun 2009

Eating a curry once or twice a week could help prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, a US researcher suggests.
The key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric.
Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques - thought to cause dementia - in the brain.
But the theory, presented at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' annual meeting, has been given a lukewarm reception by UK experts.
Amyloid plaques, along with tangles of nerve fibres, are thought to contribute to the degradation of the wiring in brain cells, eventually leading to symptoms of dementia.
Professor Murali Doraiswamy, of Duke University in North Carolina, said there was evidence that people who eat a curry meal two or three times a week have a lower risk of dementia.
He said researchers were testing the impact of higher doses - the equivalent of going on a curry spree for a week - to see if they could maximise the effect.
Animal studies
Professor Doraiswamy told the meeting: "There is very solid evidence that curcumin binds to plaques, and basic research on animals engineered to produce human amyloid plaques has shown benefits."
"You can modify a mouse so that at about 12 months its brain is riddled with plaques.
"If you feed this rat a curcumin-rich diet it dissolves these plaques. The same diet prevented younger mice from forming new plaques.
"The next step is to test curcumin on human amyloid plaque formation using newer brain scans and there are plans for that."
Professor Doraiswamy said a clinical trial was now underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, to test curcumin's effects in Alzheimer's patients.
He said research had also examined turmeric's therapeutic potential for treating conditions such as cancer and arthritis.
Good diet
He stressed that eating a curry could not counter-balance the increased risk of dementia associated with a poor diet.
However, he said: "If you have a good diet and take plenty of exercise, eating curry regularly could help prevent dementia."
Professor Doraiswamy predicted it might be possible to develop a curry pill which had the same therapeutic effect.
However, Rebecca Wood, of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, stressed that people would need to eat a lot of curry - over 100g of turmeric curry powder - to get a clinical dose of curcumin.
She said: "Professor Doraiswamy's unpublished research applies only to animal models; his hypothesis has not been confirmed in human clinical trials.
"We look forward to the results of the human curcumin trial at UCLA."
Dr Susanne Sorensen, of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "Indian communities that regularly eat curcumin have a surprisingly low incidence of Alzheimer's disease but we don't yet know why.
"Alzheimer's Society is keen to explore the potential benefits of curcumin in protecting the brain and we are conducting our own research into this area.
"A cheap, accessible and safe treatment could transform the quality of life of thousands of people with the condition."

Bacteria found in Cow Dung Can Make You Smarter.

Researchers from the Sage Colleges in Troy, NY, reported today their findings that specific bacteria common to our environment may increase learning behavior. Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks, who conducted the study, shared their findings with those in attendance at the meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

The bacteria, Mycobacteriumvaccae, is well known to scientists, as the dead bacteria is being tested as immunotherapy for asthma, cancer, depression, psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema and tuberculosis. M. vaccae, so named because it was first discovered in cow dung in Austria, is naturally found in soil, and it is inhaled when people spend time outdoors, especially where there are plants and trees.

It was found in previous research that heat-killed M. vaccae had anti-depressant effects on mice by stimulating the growth of neurons and levels of serotonin.  Mathews and Jenks, however, were curious about the effects of live M. vaccae, and fed live bacteria to an experimental group of mice to see how it would effect their navigation of a maze.

The mice that were fed the live M. vaccae learned the maze twice as fast as the control group, which had not received M. vaccae, and the experimental group exhibited less anxiety as well.

Some time later, the experimental group was taken off the bacteria and tested again against the control group.  This time, the experimental mice did not learn the maze as fast as when they were given the bacteria, but they were still faster than the control mice.

In yet a third maze learning experiment, conducted after the mice had rested for three weeks, the experimental mice ran faster than the controls, but not fast enough to make a statistically significant difference. This suggested to the researchers that the effects of M. vaccae are temporary.

“This research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals,” says Matthews. “It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.”

Take a walk outdoors when you take a break.  You’ll return more relaxed and smarter!

Clean cities

Reaching the unserved in cities 

The failure in India is the major reason why the UN cannot meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the 2.6 billion in the world without sanitation by 2015. South Asian countries resolve to try harder. Darryl D'Monte reports. 

 - A major South Asian conclave on sanitation known as SACOSAN took place in Colombo during 4-7 April. This was the fourth in a series, which began in Dhaka in 2003. Among other issues, the conclave showed that the national sanitation data put out by the Joint Monitoring Programme, consisting of UNICEF and WHO, is considerably more alarming than official figures, particularly in the India Country Paper issued by the government.

The failure in South Asia in general, and India in particular, is the major reason why the UN cannot meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the 2.6 billion in the world without sanitation by 2015. SACOSAN reiterated the resolve of South Asian countries to get their act together, including enforcing the UN right to water and sanitation.

As it happens, the India WASH Forum, consisting of NGOs and individuals working in this sector, had held a day-long consultation on "Water and Sanitation Challenges and the Urban Poor" last December, and the draft report of that event has just come out. It throws considerable light on sanitation in cities in this country, which is in many ways a more intractable problem than rural situation, given the fairly rapid rate of urbanisation and high proportion of slum dwellers.

The report refers to how the government rated cities by their progress, or lack of it, in sanitation in 2010. The 423 cities under the scanner had four categories, measured under various parameters. Not a single one made it to the Green 'best' category. Only four made it to the next best Blue category: Chandigarh, New Delhi Municipal Corporation, Mysore and Surat.

As the report underlines, "The rest of the sample fell into the last two categories, of which 159 cities fell into the worst, or 'Black' category. In this survey, the city authorities had carried out a self-assessment and assigned scores to their own services as positively as possible, but still had been unable to achieve a score of 33 points or more that would have lifted them out of the 'Black' category. Officially, access to piped sewerage stood at about 33 per cent of the population; in fact, that number was probably closer to 20 per cent, as even where lines have been laid in many places, they have not been connected."

In his keynote address, Arun Mehta, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, mentioned that the 13th Finance Commission would allocate five times as much for sanitation in the 12th Five Year Plan as in the previous plan. However, he was candid enough to admit that the expenditure of government funds by itself would not make all that much of a difference. For instance, to get rid of solid waste, which is one parameter for benchmarking urban sanitation, cities kept asking for more trucks and bins. Two years later, these trucks and bins seemed to have 'disappeared', with no clarity what happened to them. Obtaining results is more a matter of a culture of providing public services, and not merely spending official funds.

In any case, the government was unable to provide the resources to meet urban sanitation targets. A McKinsey study had estimated that the country needed something in the region of US $2.3 trillion (approximately Rs.1 lakh lakh crores) for both rural and urban sanitation over a two-decade period, and the Confederation of Indian Industry had estimated an expenditure of Rs.50 lakh crores needed over a decade. The Centre and state governments couldn't possibly provide funds on this scale, and cities must think of their own solutions.

From experience, professionals working on this all-important sector - which accounts for the largest number of deaths in the country: 780,000 die of diarrhoea every year, more than from TB - believe that it is as much a matter of "software" or generating demand for toilets, as hardware or simply providing taps and toilets. In other words, social engineering as much as conventional construction. In many rural areas, including Haryana, which has the worst sex ratio in the country, women were at the forefront in demanding the installation of a toilet in their homes.

In cities, there could even be pay-toilets, on the lines of the Sulabh Shauchalayas. In a slum, residents could be given family passes to use these toilets at a concessional rate, while casual users would cross-subsidise the use. The problem in cities like Mumbai, with the most slum dwellers of any city in the world (almost 9 million), there is often no place to build a toilet, even if the residents were ready and willing to have one.

Professionals believe that it is as much a matter of "software" or generating demand for toilets, as hardware or simply providing taps and toilets. In other words, social engineering as much as conventional construction.  •  A model for sanitation  •  Taking stock of watsan

The consultation provided insights into specific city case studies. Hyderabad has a third of its 6.4 million population in slums (while Mumbai has 60 per cent). Piped drinking water supply (368 km in length) is available for 60 per cent of the population, and this is supplemented by 2131 drinking water supply public stand posts. Sanitation coverage, with sewer lines 672 km in length, and storm water drains of 602 km, is available for about 55 per cent of the population. In one slum, Bholakpur, residents paid Rs.1500 every year to obtain water in summer, which obviously reflected the poor condition of toilets there.

According to Venkatesh Aralikatty, a consultant with Hyderabad-based Modern Architects for Rural India (MARI), which conducted the study, "The problem was especially acute for the slums which had not been notified. Grievance redressal was poor. While willingness to pay user charges was high if quality and continued supply was maintained, there was poor recovery on the part of authorities, which then led to a lack of accountability on their part. A hide-and-seek situation resulted, with authorities of the opinion that as long as the residents did not pay, they were not entitled to quality services.

"With respect to sanitation, open defecation and urination tended to be common in slum communities, as space constraints limited toilet coverage. Those people who used public toilets spent an average of Rs.720 per person per year, and women, who were charged Rs.2 as against Re.1 for men for the use of urinals, tended to pay more than men. This aspect, combined with others like poor maintenance and security, male caretakers and lack of separate entrances, meant that women constituted only 10 per cent of the user group of public toilets.

Officials tended to be apathetic about clearing old clogged sewer lines, and there were no proper systems for garbage clearance, because of which garbage tended to be dumped at crossroads. Willingness to pay was less for solid waste disposal, with the system of door to door collection of garbage with tricycles for a payment of Rs.20 per month being unacceptable to the community."

Pratima Joshi, Secretary of Shelter Associates, Pune, an NGO consisting of architects, had resorted to the novel use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to map slums (see this earlier article). Nashik is an example. There, the City Development Plan listed 104 slums. The first discovery from the independent inquiries, using GIS mapping and data from Google Earth, further verified by physical means, made by Shelter Associates was that there were 159 slums in the city, which were home to 35,000 families. However, the slum development authorities had not yet accepted the figure.

As the report cites, "Joshi speculated whether Nashik could be a city with completely individual toilets for two reasons. Firstly, the city had built a fairly extensive sewer network. Even in the case of dwellings built with tin panels beaten out of biscuit tins, the families had identified tiny spaces for toilets because they did not want to queue up in front of community toilets. Joshi said that the 65 slums for which Shelter Associates had done the rapid appraisal were home to 45 per cent of the city's poor."

Perhaps the most shocking findings in the report as a whole pertained to case studies of public toilets in cities. On behalf of the well-known NGO, Gramalaya in Tiruchirapalli, Dr S. Prabhakar presented a study on the access of the urban poor to water and sanitation in three slums of Salem and Erode in Tamilnadu. By Mumbai standards, living conditions in these slums are not all that bad. However, the researchers found that as much as 62 per cent of the residents suffered from diarrhoea and 58 per cent from worm infestation.

"With respect to access to sanitation in public places, a survey of the facilities in the bus station, railway station and main market in the two cities was made. There were separate toilet blocks for men and women in all six locations, details of which are given in the table below. In the bus stations alone there were around 1000 to 2000 users on an average every day (in Salem, for only nine toilets each for men and women). The latrines, bathing space and urinals are not proportionate to the number of people using them daily. Seats were insufficient in all the cases. Water and electricity for the facilities were supplied by the government for an annual cost.

"Convenience for the general public was not a major concern as generally, toilets were located at the most inaccessible place, in the remotest corner of the public space. Public ratings for the facilities also indicated the dissatisfaction. Availability of water was rated as 'Below Average', while accessibility & visibility and maintenance of toilets were rated as 'Poor'."

The participants at the consultation were shown a documentary titled Water and the City by Swati Dandekar, which dealt with Bangalore. The city only receives half its daily need of 1000 million litres. Even veteran former government officials and NGOs present were surprised to find out that while a kilolitre of water costs the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board Rs.34, the consumer pays, on average, just Rs.18. However, when the poor or people living on the fringe of the city buy water by pot or tanker, the price goes up to Rs.300.
⊕

Darryl D'Monte 
18 Apr 2011

Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is 

"This article was first published in India Together (www.indiatogether.org) and is republished here with permission".