‘Our boats are the face of Varanasi’

“We’ve done just two jobs – rowing and fishing, for generations. I feel that given the current state of [un]employment, my children will have to continue doing this,” says Vikramaditya Nishad. He has been rowing pilgrims and tourists of Varanasi from one ghat  (bank) to another on the river Ganga for the last 20 years.

Unemployment in Uttar Pradesh, through which the Ganga flows for over a thousand kilometres, has stagnated in the last five years at around 50 per cent, says the India Employment Report 2024.

“Modiji is campaigning for ‘Vocal for Local’ and ‘Virasat hi Vikas [Heritage is development]’ . Please tell me who is that virasat [heritage] for? Is it us, the people of Kaashi [Varanasi] or outsiders?” he adds. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected for a third time from Varanasi, and his campaigning has left a bitter taste, says the boatman adding, “we must see the development.”

Nishad says the river cruises initiated by Modi in January 2023 have robbed boatmen like him of their jobs. “In the name of development, he [Modi] takes away the development and heritage of the locals and gives it away to the outsiders,” he says, speaking of the non-locals who have come in for the big infrastructure projects. An average worker in the state is likely to earn a little over Rs. 10,000 a month, among the lowest for any state in the country.

The pollution of the river, considered to be the pinnacle of holy waters among Hindus, is another sore point for the 40-year-old boatman. “They say the Ganga water is clean now. Earlier if we dropped our coin in the river, we could take it out due to its transparency, now even if someone falls and drowns in the river, it takes days to find them,” he points out.

The Namami Gange Programme was started by the union government in June 2014 with budget outlay of Rs. 20,000 crore to reduce pollution, increase conservation and rejuvenate the Ganga. However, a 2017 paper notes that water quality index (WQI) at Rishikesh near its source and hundreds of kilometres upstream of Varanasi is very poor. WQI figures published by the Department of Science and Technology, term it as ‘alarming’.