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NEW DELHI, INDIA, October 14, 2004: As festival season progresses in India this year with Ganesh Chaturthi, Navrata, Diwali, Dusshera and Durga Puja, India’s rivers and lakes are subjected to the immersion of divine icons. Environmentalists are concerned about the subsequent aftermath of these festivals. The article explains, “Barely a month after the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, when thousands of icons of the Hindu God Ganesha immersed by devotees into water bodies around the country caused the death of fish in thousands, environmentalists are sounding alarm bells over next week’s Durga Puja festival.” Sumita Dasgupta, water coordinator at the Centre for Science and environment says, “Icons are made of Plaster of Paris, aluminium foils, paints and chemicals, many of which are carcinogenic. In addition, they absorb all the oxygen in the water, thus suffocating the fish living in them. In olden days, icons used were made of more biodegradable substances, like clay, and the dyes used were vegetable dyes. Also, the water bodies then were not as polluted by sewage, chemicals and plastic as they are now. And even the number of people and icons were much fewer.” D.K. Biswas, an environmentalist who has been actively campaigning against icon immersion adds, “The rivers are already driven to a high degree of pollution because of sewage, factory wastes and other chemicals. These practices push the edge even further, they kill the fish, pollute the water and, in turn, affect ground water in the long run.” However, some devotees are making an effort to be aware of the impact of the immersions on the environment. The article points out, “This year, while an NGO in Mumbai designed environment-friendly Ganesha icons made of papier mache that disintegrated in water and used vegetable dye for painting it, a group in Kolkata, made a separate enclosure in one of the localities for people to immerse their icons.” Dasgupta sums it up, “These are the kind of solutions that we can look forward to. We cannot ask people to stop celebrating. But we can definitely ask them to do it in an environmentally conscious way.”

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