Transcription
A person picks up flowers from a temple. They mix arsenic and lead into it and dissolve it in their water and drink it. Seems foolish, doesn't it? We are doing exactly the same thing on a national scale every day. The bottom line is that the words mother and dustbin can never go together. We are literally mixing our flush water directly into our drinking water sources without any treatment. On one hand, we fold our hands before Mother Ganga, Mother Yamuna, and on the other hand, we have practically made them the world's largest dustbin. RO also cannot completely remove mercury and lead. So, the middle class that thinks, "I have an RO, so I am completely safe," is thinking wrong. This white foam that you see is very harmful to the body. Are you a little scared? Not scared. But as always, let's start from the beginning. Imagine a very strange scenario. Someone goes to a temple, picks up sacred flowers from there. Then grinds those flowers, mixes them with poisonous chemicals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium. Makes a paste out of it and dissolves it in a glass of their drinking water and drinks it. How does all this sound? It sounds like a foolish, absolute madness. And the thing to think about is, why would any normal person do this? But I'm telling you the reality. We are doing exactly this on a very large scale nationally, every single day. And in this video today, I will tell you in detail exactly how this entire system works. Starting from temple flowers, how does this poison finally reach your dinner plate? How many thousands of crores have been wasted, and most importantly, what will be the solution to all this? So watch till the end because this is not just an environmental video. This is a question of your and your children's health. If someone comes home wearing shoes, we create a fuss. But the river flowing near that same house, which we call mother, we don't feel even a second of guilt in dumping our toxic waste into it. Because in India, this trend of polluting rivers is not just an environmental failure. It is the biggest hypocrisy of our basic logic and mentality. On one hand, we fold our hands before Mother Ganga, Mother Yamuna, and on the other hand, we have practically made them the world's largest dustbin. On one hand, water is considered to wash away sins. But who will account for the poison we are purposefully putting into it? This is the problem. When there is no system to keep account, when data is not in one place, there is no tracking, no accountability, then how will an account be kept? This entire pollution system is going out of control precisely because it is not being tracked from one place. Data is scattered here and there, and everything should be traceable, but it is not. When data is scattered in different places, the blame game starts: who is responsible? Who made the decision? Where was the error? etc., etc. That's why serious companies use independent and centralized systems like Odoo. So basically, Odoo is an all-in-one management software that helps entrepreneurs simplify their daily business activities. Whether it's billing, accounting, projects, inventory, or building a website, everything is done within a single system. In Odoo's Project app, you can see your entire project at a glance. Which work is in progress, which is stuck, and which is completed. You can create tasks. You can assign a responsible person for each task. You can set priorities, deadlines, and tags. And you can break down every big task into smaller sub-tasks. Real-time collaboration with the team happens in the form of emails, notes, files, everything in one place. Calls, meetings, and reminders are scheduled within the system, and there are also options to view the work. In Kanban view, tasks move like sticky notes. In Gantt view, the entire timeline is visible, and in List view, all data is directly in one place. Odoo is the most essential need of modern businesses. I have provided the link in the pinned comment and description. Go and check it out right now. Anyway, it is very important to pay attention to how these religious and cultural habits are practically murdering our rivers and how our health and economy have to pay the bill for this. Therefore, the first and biggest question is about the waste that we throw into the river, which we proudly consider sacred trash or a means of earning merit. What is it about these things that we are throwing this entire material into these rivers with so much overconfidence? Let's look at the numbers first. There are approximately 6.5 lakh temples in India, and from them, 80 lakh metric tons of flowers go into the rivers every year. 80 lakh tons of flowers alone. Understand the scale of this. If you were to fill these flowers in trucks, it would take approximately 4 lakh trucks. That means trucks parked bumper to bumper from Delhi to Mumbai. Filled only with flowers. So many flowers are going into the rivers every year. People sincerely think that this is worship material. They can't put it in a normal trash can. It would be an insult there, so they quietly immerse it in flowing water. They will get merit. But flowers are 100% natural and biodegradable, aren't they? They are organic matter broken from trees. If they go into water, they will dissolve naturally, won't they? If they are not putting it in the dustbin, then where would a common man see a problem with this? The problem is that people's minds still hold the old mythological image of flowers, that flowers are coming from some ancient forest or from the courtyards of gods. But the modern reality is so dark that today's flowers come from commercial farming, from agriculture, and massive levels of chemicals are used to grow them quickly and keep them fresh. Data says that these commercially grown flowers are sprayed with heavy pesticides, which directly contain arsenic, lead, and cadmium. So when we immerse those 80 lakh tons of flowers in the river, we are actually putting thousands of tons of deadly agricultural chemicals into the water, and this starts a very destructive biological process called eutrophication in scientific terms. Understand carefully how eutrophication exactly works. That is, what exactly happens after these toxic flowers fall into the river? See, when so much organic matter and chemicals start decaying together in the water, the bacteria inside the water multiply rapidly to consume them. They need oxygen to consume them. So, through this process, algae form on the surface of the river. You must have seen it; a very thick, dark green layer forms. This is called algal bloom. This layer is so dense that sunlight stops entering the water. This means the entire ecosystem inside the water is completely cut off. Completely cut off. Due to the surface being blocked, oxygen from the atmosphere cannot dissolve into the water. Therefore, the dissolved oxygen meter starts dropping rapidly. And when oxygen runs out, the aquatic life inside, fish, turtles, microorganisms, all start suffocating and dying. What was a moving living ecosystem becomes a completely suffocated dead zone. Remember the toxic foam that appeared in the Yamuna in Delhi in 2020? That white foam bubbling on the surface of the water was an advanced stage of eutrophication, and people were standing in that foamy water during Chhath Puja. They were literally bathing in cancer-causing chemicals, and they didn't even know it. And think, this is just about flowers. Flowers are anyway very light in weight and volume in comparison. If we move to the next step, we come to our festivals and idol immersions. The scale of that in India is completely next level. If we look at the data of the Hooghly River in Bengal, according to one study, more than 15,000 large idols were dumped into the water after just one festival, especially Durga Puja. Just think about that single event. And this is not just about Bengal. In Mumbai alone, more than 1.5 lakh Ganesh idols are immersed every year during Ganesh Chaturthi. Hyderabad separately, Pune separately, Indore separately. If you add up the scale of the entire country, this number reaches lakhs. And the problem here is not just the volume. The problem is the material from which those idols are made. If the idol is just made of traditional clay, then it will dissolve in water. But nowadays, 90% of idols are made of Plaster of Paris, i.e., POP. Because it is cheaper. Not just cheaper, it is also lightweight. But POP's nature is that it does not dissolve easily. It directly settles on the riverbed and solidifies like concrete, physically blocking the water flow. But the worst part is yet to come. Listen carefully. Tons of toxic varnish and paint are also used to make those thousands of idols shine, which directly mixes into the water. Imagine if someone picked up the paint chips from your house and threw them into your water, what would you do? You would fight to death, right? But when the exact same thing is happening on a tons scale in the river, no one cares. And what is inside that paint? Knowing this is even more important. Mercury and lead are specifically used to create orange and bright colors. Chromium is used for green color, and cadmium is used for bright yellow. The point to understand is that these are not normal chemicals. These are scientifically proven carcinogens, meaning cancer-causing agents and neurotoxins that damage the brain. We are practically dissolving liquid cancer into our own country's freshwater sources and celebrating outside. This destruction is not limited to just flowers and idols. And notice a pattern here. Every religious practice is harming the river in its own way. Look at the practice of milk Abhishek. Tons of milk and ghee are poured into the water every day. But isn't it true that a common man thinks, "Milk and ghee are the purest things. How can they harm the river?" Think from the perspective of the ecosystem. When you pour thousands of liters of milk into the water, the organic load spikes so suddenly that bacteria go out of control, and the water starts to rot. And ghee floats on water, doesn't it? It forms a chemical film that again blocks the oxygen exchange. The poor river cannot breathe. The same thing is with coins. To ask for a wish, everyone has to throw a coin into the water while crossing the train. It is said that in ancient times, there were copper coins which theoretically purified water. But the coins we use today are not made of copper. They are made of cheap alloys, nickel, and iron. When they degrade, they directly create heavy metal pollution in the river. Flowers have chemicals. Idols have paint. Milk fills it with bacteria. Ghee blocks oxygen. Coins bring heavy metals. Everything in a different way, but all have the same result: the slow murder of the river. And the darkest and heaviest reality in all these religious practices, which people are afraid to talk about, is dead bodies and ashes. I know this topic is sensitive, and I am not saying this to hurt anyone's faith. But if we truly want to save our rivers, we cannot turn a blind eye to this reality either. The National Green Tribunal itself gave strict orders in 2017 against dumping dead bodies into the Ganga. This means it's not just my word. The country's highest environmental court is also saying the same thing. The picture is incomplete without the dead bodies and ashes being immersed in the water. If we take the data from Varanasi alone, more than 32,000 cremations happen every year right on the banks of the river. According to some reports, this number is even higher. 200 to 300 cremations every day, with ashes completely immersed in the water. And there is a significant section of society that cannot afford the cost of wood and cremation. They simply wrap the dead bodies in a white cloth and immerse them directly in the Ganga. Now, it just looks like a dead body. But the load of this biological waste is so high that the level of fecal coliform in the water increases excessively. Fecal coliform is basically that dangerous bacteria found in human and animal excreta and decaying bodies. When its level increases beyond a limit, the water practically becomes a biological weapon. If even a drop of that water enters the stomach, severe waterborne diseases can occur. Now, it is important to clarify a very important point here. Everything I have been talking about so far – flowers, idols, dead bodies, milk, etc. – is just one part of this bigger problem. The real villain, the biggest villain causing the most damage, is our civil infrastructure. If you zoom out a bit and look at this entire scenario, when we are deliberately pushing so much toxic chemical, raw sewage, and dead matter into the water, the overall result is very disturbing. According to the latest assessment by CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board), approximately 46% of India's rivers officially fall into the polluted category. There are a total of 296 polluted river stretches in our country. Think about it, 46%. These rivers have reached a stage where forget about bathing and drinking water, even standing near them and breathing is becoming harmful. And the biggest villain of these stretches is raw sewage, the waste from cities, which most of the time, the gutter water, is discharged directly into the rivers without a single step of treatment, and this is more than 70%. That means we are literally mixing our flush water directly into our drinking water sources without any treatment. It's shocking, but that's the ground reality. If you look at the list of top polluting rivers, the Cooum River in Chennai officially ranks number one in India in terms of pollution. According to CPCB data, its BOD level is more than 345 mg per liter, whereas the safe level is 3 mg per liter. That is, more than 100 times polluted. The Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad ranks second. And the foamy visuals of Delhi's Yamuna, those toxic foams, become international news every year. You must have seen them. More than 20 major drains in Delhi dump their waste into the Yamuna daily. And look at the condition of Hyderabad's Musi River. There, 90% of the flow is not water, but only sewage. It is technically no longer a river. It has become an open sewer. Now, think about it, as responsible Indian citizens, shouldn't we have a sharp and direct question for such a system that claims to fix this and even gets our votes in the name of that claim? A total of 33,000 crores. The Ganga Action Plan started in 1986. Then came Namami Gange. So far, more than ₹33,000 crore of taxpayer money has been spent on these cleanups. Understand the meaning of ₹33,000 crore. With this much money, you could have given permanent houses to 33 lakh poor people or built 6600 government hospitals. But this money went down the drain, literally. Where is this money actually being invested? That's the main point. There's a common mythological belief that Ganga is self-purifying. It has properties that it heals itself. If it heals itself, and the government is also spending thousands of crores of rupees on the other hand, then why are these rivers still dirty today? If you really want the answer to this question, not some superficial, silly answer. This self-purifying point was not entirely baseless. But it was the truth of that era, that century, when the country's population was perhaps 50 lakh or 1 crore. Today, there are more than 150 crore people in this country. The scale has changed. Any natural flowing body has a physical limit. It has a capacity to process waste. When you dump the industrial, civil, and religious waste of 150 crore people into it, no river in the world can self-purify itself. The second point is that this entire situation is a simple textbook example of the tragedy of the commons. Understand it with a simple example. Imagine a building with 100 flats and a common terrace. Each flat owner thinks, "What harm will it do if I keep one pot or a little bit of stuff?" The terrace is so big, right? But when 100 people dump their own waste on the terrace, the terrace becomes a dump. Exactly the same is happening with the river. The river is a public property, and every common person just thinks, "What harm will it do if only I throw a coin or flowers?" The river is so big, right? But when the same question comes to the minds of 150 crore people simultaneously, this entire system collapses. The problem is that a "not my problem" mentality has set in our society. And as for the account of that ₹33,000 crore, the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tell the story of that taxpayer's money, that government's money. In ambitious projects like Namami Gange, a large part of the budget was either spent in the wrong place or not utilized properly. According to CAG, in some years, only 8 paise out of ₹1 worked. The remaining 92 paise either remained idle or went to the wrong place. And where does the problem arise? Let me tell you. Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) are built, but their planning is so flawed that if a city is generating 500 million liters of sewage daily, then the capacity of the STP being built there is only 100 million liters. So, the question also arises, where does the remaining 400 million liters go? So listen carefully. That remaining 400 million liters is bypassed through a bypass valve and discharged directly into the river. Plant operators cannot handle such overload. On top of that, there are power cuts. There is a shortage of maintenance budget. On paper, we have the world's strictest laws: the Water Act, the Environment Protection Act. But enforcement on the ground is absolutely absent. Absolutely zero. Anyway, by now, it is very clear that the country's rivers are toxic. Their nature has become dead. Bureaucracy is at its extreme of failure, and people's religious practices are practically lethal, meaning dangerous, hazardous. But the question here is, who ultimately pays the bill for all this? Do you know what the answer is? The answer is that we all are paying this bill equally. What happens is that when such issues are highlighted, when these issues are raised on social media, people think, "Yes, environmentalists will keep crying." But when we look at the actual numbers, all this poison has clearly reached inside every common person's home. Data from WHO and other sources says that every year, 37.7 million Indians, i.e., about 4 crore people, fall ill from waterborne diseases. These numbers are very disturbing. Cholera, typhoid, severe diarrhea, etc. But the most
The hard-breaking and infuriating statistic is that in India, over 1 lakh children die every year from a preventable disease like diarrhea. According to UNICEF's 2015 data, this figure was 1,17,000. Imagine, over 1 lakh children; these are as many children as are found in an entire city. This means that every year, an entire city is wiped out in this country due to diarrhea. This is not a natural disaster. This is our own man-made poison. Because this pollution is no longer limited to just rivers. It is slowly entering our groundwater and from there directly into our food. Basically, we are filling our dinner plates with the same poison that we dumped into the water after making a vow. Understand carefully how this entire chain of food chain contamination actually works in practice.
See, we human beings think that if water or paint goes into the river and the water flows away, the garbage magically disappears. That is, garbage is out of sight, out of mind. People think the water has moved on. Meaning, everything is over. But physics says matter cannot be destroyed. It doesn't disappear. When you put mercury and lead-based paint or heavy pesticides into the water, it dissolves in the water, and the algae or moss there absorbs these heavy metals like a sponge. Then small fish eat that algae. The heavy metal has now entered the bodies of those fish, and bigger fish eat those small fish, and in the end, that big fish is served on a person's plate.
And there's more to hear. Through a process called biomagnification, the concentration of that toxin increases thousands of times by the time it reaches a person's stomach. Now, don't think that if you are not a non-vegetarian, you are out of this entire chain and completely safe. Because even if someone is not a non-vegetarian, the danger for them is actually just as much. The vegetables we eat through farming, or irrigation, which we call irrigation, what is it actually? The same toxic, untreated sewage water from the Yamuna or Ganga is being pumped into the fields to grow crops. And this is not just about fish and vegetables. The water that seeps into the ground, from that very water your home's boring or tube well runs. This means whether you install a filter or not. It is not easy to remove heavy metals from a filter. Even RO cannot completely remove mercury and lead. So, the middle class that thinks, "I have an RO, I am completely safe," is thinking wrong.
In many agricultural areas of Haryana, "cancer villages" have now officially developed. What a strange word, "cancer villages." There, every second house has a cancer patient lying in it, and full credit goes to that groundwater in which your industrial sewage has dissolved and become a cocktail. In the Bhatinda district of Punjab, a train runs which people call the "Cancer Train" because dozens of cancer patients go to a hospital in Bikaner every day on that train for treatment. Due to so many patients, the train running on that route has been named the Cancer Train. This is not a story. This is documented reality. If you don't believe it, just look at the data from around Delhi and Kanpur. Your eyes will open. The spinach, coriander, and fenugreek that you eat with great pleasure there have a concentration of heavy metals two to five times higher than the limit. This is the same thing that someone took out of a temple and threw into the river. The same thing is now being stored in your and my kidneys and liver, karma returns.
Have you ever considered the economic disaster we have created, along with health? The World Bank has a clear assessment that due to water pollution, India loses about 3% of its GDP every year. And if you look at the entire environmental degradation, including air pollution, water pollution, and everything else, this figure reaches up to 6%. If we calculate the exact dollar value of total environmental degradation, it comes to about 80 billion dollars. That is, a loss of approximately ₹3.5 lakh crore every year. 73 million working days – this is not a small number. So many days are wasted because your workforce is either lying in the hospital or is sick. And this economic hemorrhage points towards a terrifying future. That future of water scarcity, about which people are not even that aware today.
In 1951, just after independence, per capita water availability in India was 5177 cubic meters. By 2021, this figure has crashed to just 10,486 cubic meters. There has been a massive drop of 71%. Understand this in simple terms. In 1951, every Indian had enough water to fill a small swimming pool every day. Today, the same person can barely fill a bathtub, and by 2050, perhaps not even a bucket. NITI Aayog has repeatedly warned that by 2050, most parts of the country will be completely water-stressed. We also saw Day Zero in Chennai in 2019 when the entire city's taps ran dry, and millions of people survived only on water tankers. Day Zero was once a fictional concept for our country. But in 2019, our country has already experienced this fictional concept, this Day Zero, in Chennai.
On one hand, water is decreasing so rapidly. Natural sources are drying up quickly. And on the other hand, we are intentionally poisoning the remaining water with paint, chemicals, and raw sewage. Now, if you understand all this concept, then you tell me, what else can this entire concept be called other than slow suicide? Is this not a suicidal loop? The most basic thing for humanity to survive is fresh water, and we are putting all our effort, money, and resources into making that water, that most basic thing, into toxic sludge. The situation is worrying, but I have not made this video just to tell you about the problem. The whole world knows the problem. The real question is, what is the solution? Is there an actual, proven way to escape this massive disaster, or are we completely trapped?
See, there is definitely hope. If we look at international examples, hope is visible there. The Thames River, the main river of London, was declared legally and biologically dead in 1950. It had so much sewage that there was no hope for the river's survival. But today, after strict policies and cleanup, more than 125 fish species are thriving there. Imagine, a dead river has been transformed into such a beautiful river where more than 125 fish species are living happily. The Rhine River in Europe is also a great example, and so is the Singapore River, which they literally transformed from a massive open sewer into a clean freshwater hub.
But foreign examples alone won't work. Because every time it feels like, "The white people can do it, but we can't." So, look at an example from our own country. The Adyar River in Chennai has been partially revived by local communities and NGOs working together. In Tamil Nadu, after court orders for the Noyal River, there was a crackdown on the dying industry, and the river improved. This means we can also do it if the system works seriously. But looking at these examples, keep this in mind: there, the government simply enforced zero-tolerance policies, and the results were evident. But when it comes to India, the matter is not so simple. Here, pollution is not just due to industrial greed. The government has the power to stop industrial waste falling into rivers, but the government cannot ban one thing, or votes will be lost. The government never speaks against the religious waste thrown into rivers.
Personally, my biggest concern is that the white people might have cleaned their rivers because they only had technical problems. They made laws, and it was fixed. But our problem is deeply psychological and religious conditioning. It is the thousands of years old habit of an ordinary person. See, it is not possible to bring about a complete shift in the mindset here in our country. And definitely not quickly. To be honest, these examples of strict laws, all these things, seem fine only in foreign examples. But solutions are mind shifts. But when? When people find a logically and emotionally acceptable alternative. The problem is not with the intention of the common man. A devout common man, meaning an extremely religious common man, truly considers the river a mother in this country. He feels extreme guilt putting his puja flowers or idols in the municipal garbage bin. The problem is the lack of alternatives.
The most brilliant example of this is startups or companies that directly collect flowers from temples. They understood that temple priests and common people would not directly give puja flowers to the garbage collector. So, they convinced them that you give us these sacred flowers. We will recycle them in a pure way. They prevented 42,300 tons of temple waste from rotting in the water. Imagine what a great job. Processing those flowers, they made chemical-free incense sticks and even leather (bio-leather). The result? Thousands of kilos of toxic pesticides were prevented from entering the Ganga. 324 marginalized women got a stable income, and it became a win-win situation for everyone. This is a perfect case study of how ecology and economy can both flourish together if the mind is applied correctly. And practically, there are other alternatives that can be implemented at the citizen level.
Like using eco-friendly clay idols instead of Plaster of Paris, and the government making a concrete rule for this. Immersing idols in artificially made immersion tanks or ponds instead of lakes or large rivers, which can be safely treated later. Instead of pouring thousands of liters of milk and ghee into the river in the name of vows, if the same thousands of liters of milk and ghee were distributed to ashrams or poor children, would the merit be any different? Absolutely not, rather it would be more. Instead of throwing coins into the river, they should be put into the actual donation boxes of the temple so that the temple's maintenance can be done better.
So, I am giving a challenge. For the next Ganesh Chaturthi or the next festival, conduct an experiment. Bring an eco-friendly clay idol and see how long it takes to dissolve versus bringing a POP idol and see how long it takes. You will understand for yourself which idol truly respects the river and which idol truly murders the river. The solutions are completely practical, and most importantly, they are in our hands. We just need to accept one fundamental truth. When alternatives are respectable, people are ready to change their old habits. We need to take this problem out of mere emotion or myth and look at it from the actual perspective of biology and physics.
The bottom line is that the words "mother" and "dustbin" can never go together. On one hand, we are putting pesticides through flowers. We are dumping toxic colors and heavy metals in the name of festivals. On the other hand, our infrastructure is failing. ₹33,000 crore have been wasted like water. But more than 70% of sewage is mixing directly into our drinking supply without treatment. Our own health is paying the ultimate price for this hypocrisy. Cancer villages, plus the death of over 1 lakh children every year, plus a shrinking water supply that will directly finish us by 2050. The bitterest truth is that we are poisoning the remaining water and ourselves. If our future generations are not to literally die of thirst and diseases, we must completely and radically change our approach.
Think about this brutal reality: India's rivers are home to practically massive biodiversity. This includes our national aquatic animal, the Gangetic Dolphin, and thousands of rare life forms. If religion, salvation, and merit all have a core fundamental of preserving and respecting life, then wouldn't the biggest and truest worship be to leave our critical rivers completely alone, to not throw even a single straw, literally a single straw, into those streams of water? So, starting today, do one thing: share this video in your family WhatsApp group because this change will only happen when the elders in the house understand. Respectfully show this video to that aunt in your neighborhood who pours milk into the river every Monday. Tell her what is good and what is bad for the mother. The change will start from there, from your home. Next time you go to dump something in the water, remember this video.