India's Sacred River Turns Toxic

The Smithsonian travels 800 miles down the Ganges River in India to investigate the ecological degradation of one of the holiest sites in Hinduism. A symbol of purity for millions of pilgrims, the environmental reality is "pure toxic muck" laden with arsenic, mercury, and dozens of other pollutants. Twenty years after the Indian government launched a plan to save the river, conditions have only gotten worse.

"The river had turned the color of Coca-Cola," said one scientist in attendance at a Hindu festival alongside the Ganges earlier this year. But commercial pressures and accelerating population growth—400 million currently live nearby, a figure expected to double—seem to doom all preservation efforts before they begin. As for the pilgrims who come to bathe in the Ganges, they're now "an endangered species." (More India stories.)