“Worship Ganga, asking for happiness and good fortune, and she will bring you heaven and salvation.”
- Padma Purana v. 60.3
Sacred and vast, the Ganges river basin is one of the world’s most populated areas. It straddles India and Bangladesh with some 400 million people living along its banks, drinking from it, relying upon it for transport, and worshipping it. Yet the Ganges is sick, ranking in the top five of the world’s most polluted rivers despite the massive annual monsoon floods from a metre of rainfall, and the river, 2,525 kilometers in length, has long been unable to adequately support the massive density of humanity that surrounds it.
The hydrology of the Ganges is very complex, involving as much underground as overground water. In 1975, researchers Roger Revelle and V. Lakshminarayana likened the river system to a huge apparatus and proposed a masterplan for developing its full irrigation potential.
Their paper, “The Ganges Water Machine”, proposed a carefully designed yet simple method for storing some of the monsoon waters underground along the delta tributaries of the river, helping create a more uniform year-round water supply to reduce drought and flood-risk, increase water quality and significantly impact the regional economy and ecology.
Today, four decades on, whilst some elements of this masterplan were implemented, it has remained little more than a “sexy title”, says water resource researcher Vladimir Smakhtin. Enter New York-based architect Anthony Acciavatti, who for almost a decade has travelled by foot, boat, and car documenting the expanse of the river Ganges, from its source in the Himalayas to the historic city of Patna nearly 1,000 kilometers downstream, and in 2008 conducted the research project Dynamic Atlas: Urbanism, Landscape, and Infrastructure Along the Ganges River Corridor. Early next year sees the release of his new book Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, published by Applied Research + Design, which promises to be a long-overdue look at an infrastructural project that has received remarkably little scrutiny considering over 400 million lives rest on its success.
“Jointly authored by people and nature”, says Acciavatti, echoing Revelle and Lakshminarayana’s words, “the Ganges River is today a monstrous water machine …a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation.”
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