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)