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Annotation #10 11/12/12 //Living River//

//Living River// was directed by Vinit Parmar and it was released in 2011. The main focus of the film was the pollution of Ganges River in India by industry and locals. He seemed to keep focusing on the fact that the river is a spiritual place, but they don’t see a problem in harming it. The film worked on a primarily emotional basis by showing visually the amount and types of pollution being dumped into the river and trying to develop the spiritual connection that many Hindus have with the place. There were some numbers to back up the movies claims but not too many. Parmar seemed to stick to a good balance of interviews of sadness over the environmental impact and those who don’t see anything wrong with the current practices. The problem I had with these interviews was that even when I could understand what the person was saying, there were still subtitles. Normally I would just say that it is excessive use that doesn’t necessarily hurt the movie, but I know that there were instances where the subtitles didn’t directly say what the person was saying. This makes me more likely to doubt the translations for what I don’t understand. If the translations were done more reasonably, the overall movie would have been better. It would have been better as an environmental education movie if the focus was more on spiritual ideals affecting decision making rather than focusing so much on all the practices that Hindus find sacred. Overall, I think the movie is directed at people with spiritual ideals to cause them to question how the decisions they make may affect them in other ways that they may not anticipate.

The primary problems that this movie points out were cultural, technological, and legal. Culturally, the movie focused on the spiritual significance of cows and the river to many in India. I was not convinced as to why cows being sacred had a direct affect on the pollution of the river. I think leaving that out would have left time for other explanations. What did matter culturally however was that 100,000,000 people bathe in the Ganges every year as they believe that it will purify them. People also dump their waste into the river believing that the river can’t actually be polluted. Their complete belief in the purity of the river prevents them from seeing potential problems that may arise from unhealthy water. These ideals allow contaminants from industry like metals to be dumped into the water. 500,000 gallons of waste water from industry are dumped into the river every day. While the water was supposed to be cleaned before being released back into the environment, broken cleaning facilities often allow dirty water through the system to avoid backup that may cause future technical problems. This shows a lack of enforcement and aid from the government who produced legislation to have this purification process in the first place. The Ganga Action Plan was supposed to prevent pollution from entering the river and to do this all tanneries had originally been moved to a central location to allow for easier combined purification of their water. The legislation was not effective as people did not continue to listen to it (probably due to lack of enforcement). Moving forward, the movie states that 1 billion dollars was loaned to India by the World Bank to clean the river, educate locals, and reform the system. Another solution in the process has India instituting a Ganga Ambassador program that will hopefully teach different societies about the problems associated with pollution. I don’t feel that just throwing money towards them is going to necessarily be enough. Corruption and lack of enforcement is something that has prevented progress in the past and money alone isn’t going to force people into action. Since world politicians are now aware of what’s going on they have to be ready to step in if changes aren’t being made or if money is spent in counterproductive ways. This has to be a last resort however since I think India should be able to fix this problem on its own.

Something that I was curious about as I saw the movie was how much of the money has been spent so far on clean up processes. According to the World Bank the project has been active starting in May 31, 2011 and will be active until December 31, 2019 (National). On the project’s webpage it does not say how much of the money has been spent so far. On the most recent project summary (the Implementation Status & Results Report) it states that the progress is just said to be “Moderately Unsatisfactory”. The report itself is rather difficult to read and I was unsure of what different parts were trying to say. The only thing I understood was that progress wasn’t being made toward the objectives or the overall implementation yet 46 million dollars had already been dispersed (Pahuja). I was confused as I couldn’t find out where that money was going unless that information just isn’t available to the public.

References: “National Ganga River Basin Project.” Washington, DC: The World Bank. Projects & Operations. Accessed: 12 Nov 2012. Updated: 31 Oct 2012. <[]>. Pahuja, Sanjay. “Implementation Status & Results: India - National Ganga River Basin Project:P119085.” Washington, DC: The World Bank. 4 Sept 2012. < http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/SAR/2012/09/04/9CEA11AB5B67A46185257A6F004C45AB/1_0/Rendered/PDF/ISR0Disclosabl004201201346766785855.pdf>.

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