Download Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia's Water Crisis AudioBook Free
Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water problems, taking readers on a quest through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The publication shows how streams, customarily revered by the folks of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent ages deteriorated dramatically due to economic improvement and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have grown to be sewage stations for a burgeoning human population. To tell the storyline of this extensive river basin, environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy treks to high mountain glaciers with hydrologists; bumps throughout the abrasive embankments of India's poorest status in a jeep with social workers; and requires a motorboat excursion through the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests by the end of the Ganges watershed. She lingers in key places and hot spots in the debate over normal water: the megacity Delhi, a paradigm of normal water mismanagement; Bihar, India's poorest, most crime-ridden status, thanks generally to the blunders of engineers who tried to tame powerful Himalayan streams with embankments but instead created annual floods; and Kathmandu, the home of one of the very most elegant and early traditional normal water systems on the subcontinent, now the site of any water-development boondoggle. Colopy's vibrant first-person narrative brings amazing places and sophisticated issues to life, introducing the reader to a memorable ensemble of characters, which range from the most humble people of Southern Asian society to engineers and former ministers. Here we find real-life heroes, bucking current tendencies, trying to find rational ways to control rivers and normal water. They are really reviving ingenious methods of normal water management that thrived for years and years in South Asia and may point the best way to normal water sustainability and healthy streams.
