India At 75, Melting Glaciers, Heatwaves And Climate Crisis

Gaumukh, India (AFP) Nov 16, 2022

From prime ministers and millionaires to labourers and ascetics, Hindu faithful dream of trekking at least once in their lives to Gaumukh, where the waters of India’s holiest river, the Ganges, emerge from a Himalayan glacier.

But the ice at the end of the arduous journey is receding rapidly and portends an increasingly dry future for a country of 1.4 billion people facing existential challenges from climate change.

“It is quite astonishing, so quick and it is happening every day and every second,” said Sheethal Vepur Ramamurthy, a researcher with Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

“We can even see the glacier dripping,” she told AFP at the site. “So, it is a harsh reality.”

“Climate change definitely plays a role. Although people may deny it is happening in front of our eyes, we just have to witness it.”

The Ganges flows for around 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) across India and is central to both Hindu identity — believers revere it as “mother Ganga” — and the survival of 500 million people who depend on its water for their daily farming, domestic and industrial needs.

Seventy-five years after independence, India has overtaken former coloniser Britain to become the world’s fifth-largest economy.

It is also the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter and second-biggest coal user.

Now, it is experiencing increasingly frequent droughts, floods and water shortages.

‘Our Identity’

“The Ganges is our culture, heritage, identity, and if it disappears, so will our life and existence,” said Sanjeev Semwal, 53, a Hindu priest in Gangotri, the town below the glacier.

Anything that impacts the river “should be a cause of worry for everyone”, he told AFP.

His family have served for generations at the town’s temple to Ganga, the goddess who personifies the river, on the banks of the meltwater stream.

With increasing prosperity and investment in infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of devotees now visit annually — a far cry from the few hundred in his father’s time.

“The human presence and the region’s weather patterns have both changed in my lifetime,” he said.

The area is a microcosm of India’s wider changes: Gangotri town has been transformed by construction in recent years, and is now packed with shops, tourist facilities, and traffic.

At the same time, the glacier of the same name has shrunk by 1.7 kilometres in 90 years, according to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.

Deadly natural disasters are becoming more frequent: at least 26 people died in an avalanche on the route to Gangotri in October.

A glacial burst in the region killed at least 72 people last year, and around 5,000 others died in 2013 when heavy rains led to flooding near another Hindu pilgrimage site.

Water Scarcity

India is one of the world’s most water-stressed countries.

It has 17 percent of the world’s population but only four percent of its water resources, and the government’s NITI Aayog public policy centre says about 600 million people already face “high to extreme water stress”.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in February that food security and agriculture-dependent economies such as India were the “most vulnerable” to the impacts of global warming.

Courtesy: Spacewar