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[global oneness project]
[Our Responsibility as Earth Citizens]
The awareness is really about everyone having a role in first and foremost stopping the pollution
[Vandana Shiva - Dehradun - Environmentalist and Author] but secondly being civic agents
or what I call earth citizens to keep rivers alive, to keep water systems alive.
And the way to keep them alive is avoiding 3 problems that these rivers are facing.
The first is pollution.
The second is the diversion of water
which leaves too little water in the rivers to flow and therefore kills them.
For example, in the mountains now there is so much dam building that the river isn't flowing,
that the Ganga is not flowing in large stretches. It's dead.
And if the Ganga isn't flowing in large stretches, it means many things.
At the very secular, mundane level it means the farmers who depended on the Ganga
to irrigate their fields have no more irrigation and no more agriculture.
But the Ganga is unusual because the reason it's respected so much
is it has a self-cleansing property.
It has beneficial bacteria that kill the nasty ones.
But that's because it picks up in the catchments the minerals, the bacteria,
the living organisms that make it a self-cleansing river.
If you don't let it flow its natural course, it's not going to be picking up those minerals,
it's not going to be the sacred Ganga water, the self-cleansing water.
The British when they used to see the Kumbh and all of that,
they used to get so annoyed, and then they tried.
They put a corpse into the river, and there was never bacteria created around it
for too long because of the self-cleansing properties.
They put cholera bugs into the river, and the cholera bugs were killed.
And that is what the Indians have worshiped, but now we are overloading the river
with the pollution and we are destroying the properties of the river
that make it the self-cleansing, sacred river.
The third serious, serious issue is privatization,
this new thinking, this new idea that water is just a commodity,
all you have to do is sell it.
And I feel very satisfied that we stopped the privatization of the Ganga.
A company called Suez was going to be given the contract for Delhi
by taking water from the Tehri Dam to Delhi and selling it
at 10 times more than what consumers in Delhi pay today.
And we organized from the Tehri Dam where the women had been displaced
down through the basin where the farmers were going to lose the water
they get from the Ganga Canal because now more water would be diverted to Delhi
to the residents and citizens of Delhi in every locality to say,
no, the Ganges water is not for sale. No water should be a commodity.
Yes, we should pay for services as a public good, as a public service,
but privatization will deepen the cultural crisis that has led to the death of our water systems.
[www.globalonenessproject.org]