cover image Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis

Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis

Cheryl Colopy. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-19-984501-9

Written over years of travel throughout India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, environmental journalist and Fulbright scholar Colopy’s “water policy travelogue through the greater Ganges basin” challenges the reader to examines the interaction between traditional practice and governmental bureaucracy, and the paradox of a culture that considers its great rivers sacred even as it overwhelms them with increasing amounts of filth from modernization and population growth. Colopy offers a whirlwind tour both beautiful and troubling, traveling with researchers, politicians, policymakers, locals, and displaced environmental victims who share their opinions and experiences with the results of complicated, often mismanaged water policy. The dense, well-researched book highlights the challenges in each region. In Delhi, toilet technology and sewage treatment failures are key issues, while the Kathmandu Valley faces flood risk from global-warming induced glacial melting even while the hiti water systems, which date back to 550 B.C. dry and fail, and the massive Melamchi engineering project, which would pipe water 16 miles into the valley, has been mismanaged for more than 30 years. Across South Asia, the ILR (interlocking of rivers) canal concept is hitting multinational stumbling blocks due to politics and conflicting ideas of what it means to “own” water. Colopy interacts as a Westerner in the South Asian world with grace, and shares what she has learned with thoughtful clarity. Photos. (Oct.)