Recent legal rulings on pollution levels in the Ganges River may turn the tide on the purity of the sacred waterway.

Last month, the Allahabad High Court ordered the closure of more than 100 tanneries that pour tons of toxic chromium into the Ganges each year in the industrial city of Kanpur. The ruling was one of a series that have stopped giant construction projects in the Ganges floodplain and mandated the construction of new waste treatment plants in cities along its banks.

Rakesh Jaiswal EcoFriends - NGO Kanpur “Court orders are one thing. Implementation is another. The court has directed the government not to release untreated sewage and industrial effluent into the Ganges on several occasions, but it's still happening."

Three sacred rivers meet at Allahabad: The Ganges, the Yamuna and the ancient and invisible and mythical Saraswati, which is said to run beneath the earth. Only the Saraswati is said to reach Allahabad in a pristine state. The Yamuna carries 1,900 million litres of raw sewage from New Delhi each day. These waters meet at one of the holiest spots in Hinduism. Allahabad hosts the Kumbh Mela every 12 years, the biggest gathering of humanity on Earth, when tens of millions of pilgrims come to wash away their sins at the confluence of the three rivers. The ‘Sangam’ where the two rivers meet is easy to see, the Yamuna has a bluish cast; the Ganges is a turbid yellow.

According to the World Bank  a new cleanup plan for the entire 1 million-square-kilometre Ganges River basin will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars, but the court decisions are advancing the cause. So far the Allahabad High Court has squashed a planned eight-lane, 1,050-kilometer expressway and giant housing on the floodplain, forced construction of more than a dozen waste treatment plants in Kanpur, Allahabad, and Varanasi, stopped the excessive diversion of Ganges water to upstream irrigation projects and cities and ordered the closure of tanneries in Kanpur.