Environmental Ethics

Volume 36, Issue 3, Fall 2014

Science, Philosophy, and Policy on the Yamuna River of India

The Yamuna, one of the sacred rivers of India, has been worshipped for centuries as a natural form of divinity. By contrast, the modern perspective is that the Yamuna is only a source of water and a means of conveying human and industrial wastes downstream. This modern per­spective relies upon anthropocentric values rising from utilitarian considerations while slight­ing deeper questions of ethical and religious values. The resulting policies are unsustainable from a scientific perspective and they disregard the cultural and religious values that might helpfully motivate human behavior with regard to the water and its use. As a consequence, the river is dangerously polluted. Given the religious significance of the river, such pollution entails a serious threat to India’s culture as well as to public health. Conservation on the river is therefore, a social, moral, and religious imperative. The rising threat to health and well-being has prompted government river clean up in which millions have been spent for building infrastructures to divert and treat sewage. However, it has had little impact on water quality. To restore the river, the connections between science and policy on one hand and religion and ecology on the other need to be better understood.