Gomukh, the glacier considered to be the primary source of the Ganges in the Indian Himalayas.
Source: Pranab basak via Wikimedia Commons
The river Ganga, one of the most important in India, supports millions of people along its banks and forms one of the largest river basins in the world, spanning about 1,087,852 square kilometres across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tibet. It generates an estimated 525 billion cubic metres of water annually, with nearly 40% of its flow coming from Nepal through major tributaries such as the Ghaghra, Kali-Gandaki, and Sapta Kosi, much of which originates in Tibet, a relatively lesser-known aspect of the river system.
In The Heads and Tails of the Ganga, Vijay Paranjape, Radhika Muley, and Chaitrali Kulkarni trace the river’s full journey, from its icy Himalayan origins shaped by glaciers, snowfields, and permafrost to the vast, biodiverse delta where it meets the Bay of Bengal. Drawing on extensive field-based research, the book shifts attention away from familiar riverbanks to the less visible extremes of the basin—the fragile headwaters and the dynamic delta systems.
At the heart of the book is a clear argument: the Ganga cannot be understood or restored in parts. By following the river across diverse landscapes, ice, forests, floodplains, and mangroves, it presents the Ganga as a connected, living system shaped by both natural processes and human intervention. This review examines how effectively the book develops this perspective, where it offers meaningful insight, and where it leaves room for greater clarity or depth.
Despite its importance, the Ganga remains highly polluted. The book notes that pollution levels have exceeded the river’s natural ability to absorb and recover while human interventions and climate change continue to worsen its condition. It argues that most studies focus on pollution and urban impacts along the main river but overlook what is happening at the source and at the tail end where the river meets the sea. Without this full view, efforts to address the crisis remain incomplete.
As the authors state, “In our anxiety to overcome the immediate crisis of river pollution and dry stretches which threaten the perennial flows in the river, we have ignored the impact of changes taking place in the water towers of the basin, i.e., the Cryosphere of the Ganga and the tail reaches beyond Farakka, in West Bengal and Bangladesh.”
The book places the river in a wider context, linking it to the development of civilisations along its course, from its origin in the Himalayas to the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta. The upper reaches, or cryosphere, remain poorly understood due to their inaccessibility and harsh conditions, stretching from Banderpoonch to the Kangchendzonga ridge on the border of Nepal and Sikkim. Similarly, the book also draws attention to the river’s neglected extremes pointing at the last 300 kilometres of the Ganga, forming the delta in Bangladesh, which remain under-represented in planning and management, despite their ecological importance.
It also challenges common assumptions about the river’s origin, noting that its headwater streams and major tributaries are more widespread than often believed, and are not located merely around its origin near Uttarakhand, but are actually spread across the band of the central Himalaya, taking the shape of the mythological ‘Shesha Naag’, from Banderpoonch to the Kanchendzonga ridgeline in the cryosphere region.
The cryosphere of the Ganga
The book draws attention to an important but lesser-known change in the river system: “What is commonly not known is that till about 250 years ago, The Ganga and the Brahmaputra were two independent and discrete river basins, with two well-separated exit points, which discharged their water into the Bay of Bengal. However, between 1776 and 1787, the mainstream Ganga migrated to the east, while the Brahmaputra migrated towards the west, consequently creating a confluence of the two rivers in the Rajbari district in Bangladesh and then travelling together southwards for about 250 kms, taking along the waters of the Meghana river."
The authors further explain how this system now functions, saying, “The three rivers eventually travel together as a single mammoth stream to exit into the Bay of Bengal." Incidentally, the traditional name of the Bay of Bengal was Gangasagar, i.e., the sea that receives the waters of Ganga. The three rivers form multiple minor distributaries and keep merging and braiding periodically; hence, the allegory of the tail which swings and swishes from east to west and west to east. Therefore, the tails of the Ganga consist of the entire deltaic region spread over parts of West Bengal in India and the entire of Bangladesh from the Gangasagar island to the west and the Bhola island to the east."
The Ganga Brahmaputra delta
Starting from this premise the book provides an extraordinarily expansive account of the river Ganges, as a young, bubbling, flowing still evolving river that travels numerous topographies - from the top of the frozen mountain glaciers where it originates to the rich deltaic regions that it gradually feathers into, to finally meet the sea. Boundaries dissolve as the river flows through landscapes, while the book weaves into it tales from the ground - of cultural and mythological beliefs and traditions on the origin of the Ganges, of ancient epics, anecdotes, pilgrimages and yatras that bind communities together, of communities that have depended on the river waters for years and the thriving biodiversity with the wonderous plants and animals that live in and around its waters.
The book dives into the incredibly biodiverse regions of the Ganga river basin -the glacial ecosystems and lakes to river and spring ecosystems, meadows and grasslands, forests, floodplains, agrarian ecosystems and delta ecosystems, all displaying unique diversity.
The book refers to species such as the Brahmakamal, Bhojapatra tree, and Bharal in the Himalayas, and aquatic life such as phytoplankton and zooplankton, walking catfish, gouramis, and the Ganges river dolphin. It also covers the Sundarbans mangrove forests and the Royal Bengal Tiger.
Rare Himalayan Flower Brahmakamal in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli District (S. Pal, 2020).
It also discusses livelihoods such as pastoralism, subsistence farming, and shifting cultivation, and the growing pressures from infrastructure, human activity, and climate change.
The Susu Dolphin or the Gangetic Dolphin (Malaviva, 2017)
The cryosphere or the head region of the Ganges keeps the river alive and is very sensitive to changes in surface temperatures. Sunlight during the spring and summer seasons warms and melts the snow and sends freshwater downstream. This meltwater forms 9 to 10 percent of the total freshwater in the Central Ganga basin and sustains farming, fishing and meets the water needs of millions of people living in the region.
However, climate change is disrupting this cycle and glaciers are melting faster than ever due to rising temperatures. In the short term, this is increasing the risk of floods due to sudden release of meltwater from the glaciers. In the long term, it could lead to less availability of water during the summer season affecting not only agriculture and livelihoods, but also drinking water and other domestic needs.
The book argues that the cryosphere of the Ganga is not just a block of ice that stores huge amounts of water, but a dynamic and interconnected ecosystem that needs to be treated as a single management zone. It argues that scientists, communities and governments need to recognise this and join hands to share knowledge across all regions in the GBM basin for better planning and management of the region.
The Tails of the Ganga river begin at the dispersion point at the Farakka barrage, where the flow gets dissected into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly through the artificial feeder canal and into the Padma river which flows into Bangladesh to form the GBM Mega Delta, two-thirds of which is in Bangladesh while one-third is in India. The waters of the Ganga are replenished in the last stretch with clean waters that help to keep the river regime alive while supporting remarkable biodiversity.
However, land-use changes, abstraction and diversion of water, construction of dams and barrages, sand mining and encroachment in riverbeds have led to the reduction in flows, saline ingress, and increase in episodes of floods and droughts in the delta region threatening biodiversity and livelihoods and calling for the need to have better cooperation between India and Bangladesh, renewal of agreements between two countries and sustainable management of the region.
The Sundari mangroves of the Sunderbans (Hippopx, 2017)
Painting a rich canvas of the Ganga river basin, the book locates the deteriorating state of the river into the historical and the current sociocultural, climatic, and political context. The book describes how the free-flowing, revered Ganga became a huge water machine to be controlled and conquered through developmental projects such as dams, barrages, unplanned urban expansion, roads and bridges, and tourism and became polluted because of untreated sewage and waste from industries and agriculture entering into its waters. Pilgrimages and yatras were gradually replaced by blind rituals for commercial gains.
The well-known self-purifying qualities that retained the cleanliness of its waters in the upper reaches of the Ganga till the 18th century have to do with the extremely high Dissolved Oxygen (DO) content in the Ganga’s water (between 7 and 13 mg/litre), sparse human population and lack of industries and the presence of bacteriophages, i.e., bacteria eaters in the waters that destroy all the pathogens present in the waters. The bacteriophages are released from the cryosphere when the permafrost melts and they wake up from their hibernation phase and help in cleansing the river.
But then, this self-purification capability of the river has its limits, argues the book when levels of pollution are exceeding limits in the river ecosystem. Current studies have revealed a shocking reality. Pollution has reached such high limits that faecal coliform bacteria were found even in the farthest exit point of the Gangotri glacier, shaking the foundations of the perception of the self-purifying properties of the Ganges among people as well as scientists.
Efforts to clean the Ganga have done very little to change the situation of the river. Its flows have reduced, its biodiversity is under threat, and interventions and climate change have turned the Ganges river basins into the most disaster-prone basins at the upper reaches and the tail region.
The book argues that this is because of the very myopic view of looking and breaking down the Ganga into its parts and trying to solve the issue of its pollution by installing sewage treatment plants and ensuring minimum flows to restore an ecologically integrated river basin, which needs to be questioned at the policy level.
The book points out that the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna river system spans multiple countries, including India, Bangladesh, Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Despite this shared geography, there is limited coordination and long-term planning across these regions. The authors argue that this lack of cooperation weakens efforts to manage the river effectively, especially as urbanisation and climate change place increasing pressure on both the upper and lower parts of the basin.
To address this, the book calls for a more integrated approach. It stresses the need for a legal and institutional framework that treats the river as a single, connected system. This includes developing an Integrated River Basin Management Plan, improving the use of real time data to monitor the river, and recognising the Ganga as a living entity with its own rights.
The thirteen chapters of the book offer a wide and detailed account of the river, bringing together cultural, historical, and environmental perspectives. Its strength lies in connecting these different aspects across the river’s full course. While the chapters are long, they are rich in detail and provide moving accounts of how civilisations have and continue to share a deep bond with the river over the years.
The review also notes that the addition of maps showing headwaters, tributaries, and key regions would make the narrative easier to understand. Given the rapid environmental and geopolitical changes affecting the basin, an updated edition would be useful.
The book serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in studying the Ganga, including researchers, policy makers, and environmental practitioners, while also encouraging a broader view of looking at the river as a dynamic and interconnected system.
A soft copy of the book can be found here
A hard copy of the book can be accessed at this link