Recently I was on Netflix watching the nature documentary show Wildest India and heard about water that can actually clean itself. This self-purifying title is strictly given to the water of India’s longest River, the Ganges (Kim). The mini-series’ narrator, Paul McGann, explained the phenomenon by using two examples of unlikely occurrences with the water. In the first, it has been estimated that more than 400 million people depend on the river for their livelihood and many of those people bathe in it regularly (Rogers). With that many people bathing in the river, there have been no epidemics caused by sharing the river. McGann also uses the observation that animal life is thriving in this river despite the fact that it is one of the most polluted water systems in the world.
Abnormalities like these two are only a couple of reasons why people inside and outside India’s borders see the river as a holy place to go to for the washing away of sins and in matters of death (The Telegraph). The Indian Emperor Akbar the Great (1542-1605) praised the river’s “water of immortality” and would not drink water from any other source (Grant, 115).
Scientific evidence has almost certainly proven that the water of the Ganges can in fact clean itself, but much like with the case of cigarettes causing lung cancer, scientists have not been able to prove what in the water is doing the cleaning (Hollick). Retired hydrologist professor D.S. Bhargava, “who has spent a lifetime performing experiments up and down (the) Ganges in the plains of India”, “says that the Ganges’ self-purifying quality leads to oxygen levels 25 times higher than any other river in the world” (Hollick). Bhargava performed an experiment to prove the self-cleaning water hypothesis by filling two beakers with water from the Ganges. In one beaker the water was boiled then cooled and in the other it was left untouched. Bhargava went on to place pathogens into both beakers and found that the pathogens only were able to survive in the once-boiled water (Bhargava).
There have been varying theories on what makes the water self-purifying. One came from an Indian Spiritual leader named Swami Ramesh Chand who claimed that the cleaning properties came from sulfur picked up from the riverbed, but this was quickly disproved. The leading theory right now is based off of how the Ganges starts in the Himalayas and descends from there. Molecular biologist Dr. Jay Ramachandran asserts that the cleaning particle in the water is a certain type of bacteria phage that comes from the glaciers of the Himalayas. Many scientists agree with Ramachandran that the phage is responsible for the preservation of Ganges wildlife and the lack of disease outbreaks among Indians.
If in fact the bacteria phage is responsible for the cleansing of the water, I am curious if the phage can be placed into other waters from around the world and if it would cleanse that water as well. If so, and the phage does not harm people who are not adapted to digesting it, could it be the answer to naturally cleansing polluted waters around the world? In tandem with LifeStraw (which is a fantastic, life-saving product) we may be able save millions of lives byplacing the phage into bodies of polluted waters, pending the phage does not harm or alter the ecosystem in any dramatic ways.
I have never heard of the bacteria phage in the Ganges, but I knew that many people went there for their daily tasks as well as on certain special occasions. It makes me wonder if the wildlife in the river has adapted to the pollution or if the phage does not harm them. In other words, I wonder if the people and the wildlife have become accustomed to it or if the phage really does clean the water. What about people from other countries, will the water harm them or not? It is hard to know for certain, but maybe some day we will be able to answer that question. Maybe it is just a self cleaning river!
This is a really interesting topic! I have always assumed that since the rivers were very polluted there would be little to no life and that disease would spread rapidly through it. The fact that the water strait out of the river is cleaner than it is after it is boiled is amazing! It would be cool the amount of things scientists could do if the phage bacteria from the HImalayas really does have a self cleaning property!