Spanish
Lakes, rivers, and seas in southern and western India are overflowing these days with chemical compounds released from hundreds of thousands of images of the elephant god, immersed in the waters by masses of devotees during the ten days that the recently concluded Hindu festival Ganesha Chaturthi lasted.
Only in the western locality of Nashik, in one of the regions where the festival is most celebrated, municipal authorities rescued nearly 240,000 figures from the waters last Thursday, many of them several meters high, and 169 tons of offerings to the god.
On the first day of the festival, families place figures of the deity in their homes, while religious committees and neighborhood groups display theirs in temporary structures or "pandals", where they are venerated by the community until the day chosen for immersion.
The deputy director of the environmental NGO Toxic Links, Satish Sinha, recalls how when he was a child, just three or four decades ago, images were made with clay and vegetable dyes.
Nowadays, he explained to Efe, most are made from Paris plaster using molds, a much faster and easier way to recreate images of the elephant god Ganesha en masse, compared to artisanal production with clay.
With Paris plaster, a material that "doesn't disintegrate", and industrialization came environmental problems to this ancient tradition.
Even more than the material, Sinha is concerned about the use of synthetic paints, especially because of their high lead content, a component with a known "adverse impact on humans".
"When you put such large amounts of images in such a small place, the paint used will undoubtedly move to the water. And lead is a heavy metal, it is not destroyed, but has a very long life," he warned.
After analyzing various parameters in two lakes before and after the festival of the elephant god, researchers from Patkar-Varde University, in the state of Maharashtra (west), concluded that the ritual raises the levels of acidity and heavy metals in the water.
Both lakes registered a strong acidification, going from PH indexes of 6.7 and 6.8, respectively, to a PH of 7.5, highlights the study, published in 2014 in the International Journal of Scientific Research (IJSR, in English).
