"the Padma grew to become the main channel of the Ganges. It is thought that the Bhagirathi-Hooghly became increasingly choked with silt, causing the main flow of the Ganges to shift to the southeast and the Padma River. By the end of the 18th century the Padma had become the main distributary of the Ganges. One result of this shift to the Padma was that the Ganges joined the Meghna and Brahmaputra rivers before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, together instead of separately. The present confluence of the Ganges and Meghna formed about 150 years ago. Also near the"
"Ganges Canal The Ganges or Ganga Canal is a canal system that irrigates the Doab region between the Ganges River and the Yamuna River in India. The canal is primarily an irrigation canal, although parts of it were also used for navigation, primarily for its construction materials. Separate navigation channels with lock gates were provided on this system for boats to negotiate falls. Originally constructed from 1842 to 1854, for an original head discharge of 6000 ft³/s. The Upper Ganges Canal has since been enlarged gradually for the present head discharge of 10,500 ft³/s (295 m³/s). The system consists of"
"empties into the Bay of Bengal. The Ganga is one of the most sacred rivers to Hindus. It is also a lifeline to millions of Indians who live along its course and depend on it for their daily needs. It is worshipped in Hinduism and personified as the goddess Gaṅgā. It has also been important historically, with many former provincial or imperial capitals (such as Bikrampur, Dhaka,Sonargaon, Rajshahi, Kannauj, Kampilya, Kara, Prayag or Allahabad, Kashi, Pataliputra or Patna, Hajipur, Munger, Bhagalpur, Murshidabad, Baharampur, Nabadwip, Saptagram and Kolkata) located on its banks. The Ganges is highly polluted. Pollution threatens not only"
"Ganges will merge with Kalindri in the eastern side and the combined flow will merge with Mahananda at Nimasarai Ghat of Malda and afterwards the collective flow will merge with Ganges/ Padma in Godagari Ghat of Bangladesh. The Ganges has numerous abandoned channels in the area. As of 2013, an estimated 2.4 million people reside along the banks of the Ganges alone in Murshidabad district. The main channel of the Ganges has a bankline of 94 km along its right bank from downstream of Farakka Barrage to Jalangi. Severe erosion occurs all along this bank. From a little above Nimtita,"
"in India, the College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee (Now Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee). Ganges Canal The Ganges or Ganga Canal is a canal system that irrigates the Doab region between the Ganges River and the Yamuna River in India. The canal is primarily an irrigation canal, although parts of it were also used for navigation, primarily for its construction materials. Separate navigation channels with lock gates were provided on this system for boats to negotiate falls. Originally constructed from 1842 to 1854, for an original head discharge of 6000 ft³/s. The Upper Ganges Canal has since been enlarged"
"and partially cremated bodies directly into the Ganges River. Downstream, the untreated water is used for drinking, bathing, and washing. This situation is typical of many rivers in India and river Ganga is less polluted comparatively. Open defecation is widespread even in urban areas of India. The Ganges River has been considered one of the dirtiest rivers in the world. The extreme pollution of the Ganges affects 600 million people who live close to the river. The river waters start getting polluted right at the source. The commercial exploitation of the river has risen in proportion to the rise of"
"river carries millions of tonnes of sediment load and deposits it in the plains. The sediment deposition creates many severe problems like the decrease of river depth. The Ganges is a meandering river and Farakka Barrage has disrupted the dynamic equilibrium of the river and hindered the natural oscillation of the river within its meandering belt, which is about 10 km wide in Malda and Murshidabad districts. The river has a general tendency to shift towards the left bank upstream of the Farakka Barrage and towards the right bank below the Farakka Barrage. River bank failure is because of certain"
"Ganges Basin The Ganges basin is a part of the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin draining 1,086,000 square kilometres in Tibet, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. To the north, the Himalaya or lower parallel ranges beyond form the Ganges-Brahmaputra divide. On the west the Ganges Basin borders the Indus basin and then the Aravalli ridge. Southern limits are the Vindhyas and Chota Nagpur Plateau. On the east the Ganges merges with the Brahmaputra through a complex system of common distributaries into the Bay of Bengal. Its catchment lies in the states of Uttar Pradesh (294,364 km²), Madhya Pradesh (198,962 km²), Bihar (143,961 km²), Rajasthan"
"the Ganges by greatly diminishing the flow of the river. The Farakka Barrage was built originally to divert fresh water into the Bhagirathi River but has since caused an increase of salinity in the Ganges, having a damaging effect on the ground water and soil along the river. Apart from this, Bangladesh and India faced major tensions due to this barrage. The government of India planned about 300 dams on the Ganges in the near future and the tributaries despite a government-commissioned green panel report that has recommended scrapping 34 of the dams citing environmental concerns. Gangotri glacier which feeds"
"km (155.343 mi) through its narrow Himalayan valley, the Ganges emerges from the mountains at Rishikesh, then debouches onto the Gangetic Plain at the pilgrimage town of Haridwar. At Haridwar, a dam diverts some of its waters into the Ganges Canal, which irrigates the ""Doab"" region of Uttar Pradesh, whereas the river, whose course has been roughly southwest until this point, now begins to flow southeast through the plains of northern India. The Ganges follows an arching course passing through the cities of Kannauj, Farukhabad, and Kanpur. Along the way it is joined by the Ramganga, which contributes an average"
"Ganga which are responsible for its pollution. Traditional beliefs hold that being cremated on its banks and to float down the Ganga will atone for the sins of those who die and carry them directly to salvation. In Varanasi alone, an estimated forty thousand bodies are cremated every year, many of those are only half-burnt. Built in 1854 during the British colonisation of India, the Haridwar dam has led to decay of the Ganges by greatly diminishing the flow of the river. The Farakka Barrage was built originally to divert fresh water into the Hooghly River but has since caused"
"storms and rains, which give the river half of its flow-waters in just a few weeks, and helps wash down an astonishing 2 billion tons of sediment into the plains of India, making it the most fertile soil on Earth. The film ends by following the river down from Devprayag, where the Alakananda and Bhagirathi rivers converge and the Ganges finally is identified as a separate river, and through the Holy cities of Rishikesh and Haridwar. The story of the river is taken up in this episode as it leaves the Himalayan foothills and enters the swamplands known as the"
"descended upon the earth to purify and prepare the dead (Alley 2008:171, Haberman 2006:60-61, Narayanan 2001:190-191). The River Ganges (Ganga) in India is seen as the physical embodiment of this goddess. Since the river waters are as both inherently pure themselves and having major purificatory qualities (Alley 2008:173-174, Nelson 2008:102), people come to bathe in them, drink from them, leave offerings for them, and give their physical remains to them. The Ganges is said to purify the soul of negative ""karma"", corporeal sins, and even impurities from previous lives (Nelson 2008:102). At sunrise along the Ganges, pilgrims descend the ""ghat"""
"of the most highly favored sites for funerary rituals in India. It is presumed that if a deceased person is cleansed by the Ganges, it will help liberate their soul, or expedite the number of lives they need to achieve this (Altman 2002:137, McClaymond 2008:315). In the traditional funerary ceremony, a dead person is placed upon a funeral pyre until the body becomes cremated, then the ashes are sent upon the river (Michaels 2004:136-139). Many Hindus go to great lengths to purify themselves one last time before death. When this is not possible, family members will actually mail the ashes"
"branches. The western branch, which contains the majority of the river's flow, continues due south as the Jamuna () to merge with the lower Ganges, called the Padma River (). The eastern branch, formerly the larger but now much smaller, is called the lower or old Brahmaputra (). It curves southeast to join the Meghna River near Dhaka. The Padma and Meghna converge near Chandpur and flow out into the Bay of Bengal. This final part of the river is called ""Meghna"". In the past the course of the lower Brahmaputra was different and passed through the Jamalpur and Mymensingh"
"than a dip in the actual river, which is thought to remit sins, especially at one of the famous tirthas such as Gangotri, Haridwar, Prayag, or Varanasi. The symbolic and religious importance of the Ganges is one of the few things that Hindu India, even its skeptics, are agreed upon. Jawaharlal Nehru, a religious iconoclast himself, asked for a handful of his ashes to be thrown into the Ganges. ""The Ganga,"" he wrote in his will, ""is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph,"
"In Mahabharatha, when Bhishm was about to die, Arjuna is said to have extracted groundwater, namely, Patalganga, by shooting an arrow which made a hole in the ground and created a fountain. According to the Puranas, there are three tributaries of the River Ganges and they are Swarg Ganga (Mandakini), Bhoo Ganga (Bhagirathi) and Patal Ganga (Bhagvati). Before entering into the sea, the Ganges divides into several tributaries and then merges into the Bay of Bengal. The Patalganga river has been mentioned in ancient vedic texts and the temples in Turade-Karade area and its banks were considered holy and a"
"the order is Ganges, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Sutudri Sutlej), Parusni. Later Vedic texts record the river as disappearing at Vinasana (literally, ""the disappearing"") or Upamajjana, and in post-Vedic texts as joining both the Yamuna and Ganges as an invisible river at Prayaga (Allahabad). Some claim that the sanctity of the modern Ganges is directly related to its assumption of the holy, life-giving waters of the ancient Saraswati. The Mahabharata says that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert (at a place named Vinasana or Adarsana). Nineteenth and early 20th century scholars, such as orientalist Christian Lassen (1800–1876), philologist and Indologist Max"
"the river Ganges is 30.2 km long and between 0.5 and 2.5 km wide is one of the largest in the Himalaya. However, Due to global warming it has been receding since 1780, although studies show its retreat quickened after 1971. Over the last 25 years, Gangotri glacier has retreated more than 850 meters, with a recession of 76 meters from 1996 to 1999 alone. The ""UN 2007 Climate Change Report"" has suggested that the glacial flow may completely stop by 2030, at which point the Ganges would be reduced to a seasonal river during the monsoon season. The Ganga"
"better utilise its share of the waters of the Ganges. The Ganges is a sacred river to Hindus along every fragment of its length. All along its course, Hindus bathe in its waters, paying homage to their ancestors and to their gods by cupping the water in their hands, lifting it and letting it fall back into the river; they offer flowers and rose petals and float shallow clay dishes filled with oil and lit with wicks (diyas). On the journey back home from the Ganges, they carry small quantities of river water with them for use in rituals (Ganga"
"the Ganges basin, with the western part of the Ganges basin draining into the Yamuna and the eastern part directly into the Ganges itself. All the rivers, which drain into the Ganges, flow from south to north, with the Chambal, Shipra, Kali Sindh, Parbati, Kuno, Sind, Betwa, Dhasan and Ken rivers being the main tributaries of the Yamuna. Shipra River is one of the most sacred rivers of Hinduism. It is the site of the Simhastha Kumbh Mela, which is held every 12 years. The land drained by these rivers is agriculturally rich, with the natural vegetation largely consisting of"
"arrangement and recognised Bangladesh's rights as a lower-level riparian. Descending from India's northern plains, the Ganges river forms a boundary of 129 kilometres between India and Bangladesh and flows for 113 km in Bangladesh. At Pakaur in India, the river begins its attrition with the branching away of its first distributary, the Bhagirathi River, which goes on to form the Hooghly River. About 10 kilometres from the border with Bangladesh the Farakka Barrage, built in 1974, controls the flow of the Ganges, diverting some of the water into a feeder canal linking the Hooghly to keep it relatively silt-free. After"
"209 have partial sewage treatment facilities, and only 8 have full wastewater treatment facilities. Downstream, the river water polluted by the untreated water is used for drinking, bathing, and washing. A 1995 report claimed 114 Indian cities were dumping untreated sewage and partially cremated bodies directly into the Ganges River. Lack of toilets and sanitation facilities causes open defecation in rural and urban pill areas of India, like many developing countries. This is a source of surface water pollution. Sewage discharged from cities,towns and some villages is the predominant cause of water pollution in India. Investment is needed to bridge"
"year (experts blame climate change) and deforestation in the Himalayas is causing subsoil streams flowing into the Ganges river to dry up. Downstream, India controls the flow to Bangladesh with the Farakka Barrage, 10 kilometers (6 mi) on the Indian side of the border. Until the late 1990s, India used the barrage to divert the river to Calcutta, to keep the city's port from drying up during the dry season. This denied Bangladeshi farmers water and silt, and it left the Sundarban wetlands and mangrove forests at the river's delta seriously threatened. The two countries have now signed an agreement"
"flows through Kolkata, and looks at the effect large scale populations are having on the river itself, with their ever-increasing pollution, and asks whether the river, and its inhabitants like the Ganges river dolphin, can survive the onslaught. Having watched the rise of the Ganges in the Himalayas and its flow through the plains of India, in the final episode we see the effect the river has when it meets the Bay of Bengal and forms the largest delta system in the world. The delta itself straddles both India and Bangladesh, part of which is the world's largest mangrove swamp,"
"discharge, and the 15th longest. With its origin in the Manasarovar Lake region, located on the northern side of the Himalayas in Burang County of Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo River, it flows across southern Tibet to break through the Himalayas in great gorges (including the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon) and into Arunachal Pradesh (India). It flows southwest through the Assam Valley as Brahmaputra and south through Bangladesh as the Jamuna (not to be mistaken with Yamuna of India). In the vast Ganges Delta, it merges with the Padma, the popular name of the river Ganges in Bangladesh, and finally"
"Asia's biggest rivers – Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Yellow – could disappear by 2350 as temperatures rise and human demand rises. Approximately 2.4 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers. India, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar could experience floods followed by severe droughts in coming decades. In India alone, the Ganges provides water for drinking and farming for more than 500 million people. Evan Fraser, a geographer at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, explores the ways in which climate change may affect future famines. To do this, he draws"
"the Delhi Ridge; the western part consists of the Punjab Plain, and the eastern part consists of the Ganga–Brahmaputra drainage systems. This divide is only 350 metres above sea level, causing the perception that the Indus-Ganga Plain appears to be continuous from the Yamuna River in the west to the state of West Bengal in the east. The lower Ganges plain and the Assam Valley are more verdant than the middle Ganga plain. The lower Ganga is centered in West Bengal, from which it flows into Bangladesh. After joining the Jamuna, a distributary of Brahmaputra, both rivers form the Ganges"
"between 50,000 and 100,000, and about 48 towns. A sizeable proportion of the effluents in Ganges are caused by this population through domestic usage like bathing, laundry and public defecation. Countless tanneries, chemical plants, textile mills, distilleries, slaughterhouses, and hospitals contribute to the pollution of the Gangas by dumping untreated toxic and non-biodegradable waste into it. It is this sheer volume of pollutants released into the river every day that are causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem and contributing to significant sanitation issues. Built in 1854 during the British colonisation of India, the Haridwar dam has led to decay of"
"the Meghna River on the east. The Ganges Delta has the shape of a triangle and is considered to be an ""arcuate"" (arc-shaped) delta. It covers more than , and although the delta lies mostly in Bangladesh and India, rivers from Bhutan, Tibet, India, and Nepal drain into it from the north. Approximately 60% of the delta is in Bangladesh and, 40% in West Bengal, India. Most of the delta is composed of alluvial soils made up by small sediment particles that finally settle down as river currents slow down in the estuary. Rivers carry these fine particles with them,"
"river Ganges is polluted by millions of people bathing in it. To cleanse herself, Ganges acquires the form of a black cow and comes to the Narmada to bath in its holy waters. Legends also mention that the Narmada River is older than the river Ganges. Bharuch is also a sacred tirtha for Jains. This tirtha is situated in the Bharuch city on the rail and road path, in the Shrimali Pole. Here we see the idol of Muni Suvrata Swami; black in complexion and in Padmasana posture. In the history of the Jainas, this ancient city is important from"
"destroy) or alternatively, ten lifetimes of sins. Those who cannot journey to the river, however, can achieve the same results by bathing in any nearby body of water, which, for the true believer, in the Hindu tradition, takes on all the attributes of the Ganges. The ""karunasiri"" is an old theme in Hinduism with a number of different versions of the story. In the Vedic version, Indra, the Lord of Svarga (Heaven) slays the celestial serpent, Vritra, releasing the celestial liquid, the ""soma"", or the nectar of the gods which then plunges to the earth and waters it with sustenance."
"discharge of about , or . In other cases the average annual discharges of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna are given separately, at about for the Ganges, about for the Brahmaputra, and about for the Meghna. The maximum peak discharge of the Ganges, as recorded at Hardinge Bridge in Bangladesh, exceeded . The minimum recorded at the same place was about , in 1997. The hydrologic cycle in the Ganges basin is governed by the Southwest Monsoon. About 84% of the total rainfall occurs in the monsoon from June to September. Consequently, streamflow in the Ganges is highly seasonal. The"