It's interesting that the reactions are non-judgmental. That said, India is really filthy. We (Indians) keep the insides of our homes spotless, but anything outside of the house is fair game. People don't give a second thought about dumping trash on the street, or peeing on a wall, but you'll raise eyebrows if you walk inside a house with your footwear on. Sigh.
The amount of corpses is just weird. Here's a story about someone who collects corpses on the Yellow River and returns them, for a bounty, to the family.
> Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives' corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.
Eh, what's a few dead bodies and rotting corpses? The same "filth" is found in pretty much any large body of water...whether in solid or liquid form. Are US rivers really any cleaner? Industrial runoff, agricultural runoff and any number of other pollutants
By any reasonable measure, yes, almost every U.S. river is substantially cleaner than almost every Indian river. Take fecal coliform bacteria. They grow in poop and they make people very sick. Western sanitation, for all its flaws, has largely solved the problem of coliform bacteria.
The standard scoring for fecal coliform bacteria is the number of organisms found in a 100 ml sample. In the U.S., anything above 500/100 ml will close a beach or river for swimming. In the Ganges, the count ranges from 60,000 / 100 ml to 1.5 million (!) / 100 ml. [1] Compare to the Mississippi River near New Orleans, where the EPA found averages between 382 and 2,528 / 100 ml. [2]
I'm sure there are other measures, but for the simple measure of "is this water safe to drink or bathe in," the Ganges really is one of the worst in the world. Improvements have been seen, but this isn't one where we can say "it's all the same."
The same may not have been true a few decades ago. I recall stories when I was younger of rivers catching on fire. That's when you know things are bad :-)
Today however, almost all US waterways are in fairly good shape. We have made tremendous strides in the last few decades cleaning things up.
'Few' or thousands or may be millions, who knows? Is there some kind of data or statistical study to help here?
Calling that there is filth elsewhere too isn't really a great argument to support your shrug. It is understandable though that it hurts to see one's homeland in poor light. It's a good emotion to have - love your land - should be used to emphasize and drive clean up.
