The ghats have been spared the ravages of immersion this year, leaving the river to bear the burden of tons of garbage drifting away from shore with the tide.

Almost 4,000 idols — around 3,000 on the Calcutta side and close to 1,000 across the river — were immersed in the Hooghly between Wednesday and Sunday under the supervision of a civic administration that managed to keep the ghats clean but struggled to save the waters from pollution.

A post-immersion scan on Monday showed that care had been taken to keep the main ghats on either side of the Hooghly — Baje Kadamtala and Gwalior ghat on the city side and Ramkrishnapur in Howrah — free of litter through the three days of immersion. But as the eyes travelled to the waters, the sight of floating idol structures and debris proved that Calcutta’s effort to prevent immersion pollution has been cosmetic at best.

Metro takes stock.

 

Ghats clean, not river

While the civic administration focused on the concrete ghats, little effort was apparently made to remove immersion waste from the waters. At Doi ghat, the southernmost immersion point on the Calcutta side, floating idol structures were bunched together near the mouth of the link between Tolly’s Nullah and the Hooghly on Monday afternoon. Idol structures floating not far from the shore at Nimtala ghat attracted a group of people who spent much of the afternoon in waist-high water to retrieve anything that could fetch a price.

Shibpur ghat on the Howrah side looked no better. When high tide started, the debris at Baje Kadamtala ghat moved further away from reach along with the floating water plants.

“The ghats may be cleaner than they usually are after immersion but the river looks in bad shape,” rued Sudipto Bhattacharjee of Sabuj Mancha, a forum of non-profit environment organisations.

 

North-south divide

The ghats in the south fared better than those in the north this year because they had better infrastructure and more manpower to cope with the immersion load.

Ropes were used to barricade the immersed idols in the southern ghats and around 70 workers of the Calcutta Port Trust deployed to remove them from the waters before they floated away. Baje Kadamtala even had a crane to quickly lift the larger idol structures.

At Ramkrishnapur, a net was used to keep the idols and other debris from floating away. The Howrah Municipal Corporation deployed a large contingent of workers to clean the ghat on all three immersion days. In contrast, Nimtala and the ghats further north lacked both infrastructure and supervision.

Local toughs controlled the immersion process in the absence of officials, sources said.

“Idol structures were left in the waters for the clay to melt so that they could take away the structures. The smaller idols were allowed to float away along with the hay. The police were there, albeit as spectators,” a green activist said.

Telkal and the northern ghats in Howrah witnessed similar scenes. “These are not the busier immersion ghats but lack of arrangements ensured that the level of pollution was high. We counted around 50 floating structures on Thursday night,” said Gitanath Ganguly of Sabuj Mancha.

Few overused, several underused

The lack of planning showed. The police, who did a splendid job of traffic management from Sashthi till Dashami, seemed to have little clue about managing the immersion process.

So while ghats like Baje Kadamtala and Gwalior in the south and Nimtala in the north took most of the immersion load, contiguous locations such as Doi ghat in the south and Natherbagan ghat in the north were underutilised. In Howrah, Telkal ghat didn’t receive many immersion parties but Ramkrishnapur ghat was crowded.

“We will consider all these aspects and try to conduct the immersion process better next year, especially in the northern ghats of the city,” said Debasish Kumar, the CMC’s mayor-in-council in charge of immersion.

His Howrah counterpart Debasish Ghosh promised to “try and replicate the Ramkrishnapur model in other ghats next Puja”.