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Interfaith leaders paid homage to the Bagmati river at Pashupati Aryaghat pouring sacred water collected from 16 different rivers across Nepal, Panchakanya offered oil-fed lamps just as Buddhist monks and traditional Nepali bands played traditional music, and the 7 th Annual Bagmati River Festival was thrown open here today.
The two-month-long festival featuring clean-up campaigns water sports, rock concerts and heritage walks along the Bagmati is aimed at raising public awareness to try and revive the beauty of the once-pristine river flowing down the populated and polluted City of Katmandu.
At the grand opening today – coinciding with the World Environment Day – interfaith leaders including Hindu priests, Buddhist monks, and Muslim, Christian and Jewish teachers – were present. They offered sacred waters from 16 Himalayan rivers to the Bagmati in a rare symbolic gesture highlighting the importance of the Bagmati as a precious source of life and faith.
"We are doing it every year hoping that it will open the eyes of our government and our citizens who all have to accept collective responsibility for the plight of the Bagmati rivers and most of its tributaries such as Dhobikhola, Tukucha, Manohara etc," said Megh Ale, President of Nepal River Conservation Trust (NRCT), the organizer of the event.
Also present at today's clean-up at Aryaghat-Tilganga area were school children, participants of Mr and Miss University 2007, volunteers from Korea and staffers of SkyChef, a food supplying unit located at Tilganga and several local volunteers. "This is not enough, we should be doing much more," Sange Dorje Lama, a Buddhist monk at the site said.
Experts say the Bagmati water is so polluted that it's unsafe even for irrigation and no aquatic life survives in polluted segments – thanks to years of lawlessness that has encouraged reckless -- and illegal -- disposal of both solid and liquid wastes by nearly two million denizens of Katmandu Valley.
Equally responsible are corporate houses and industries along the river that have been dumping hazardous effluent into the river. Until recently, the Katmandu metropolis too was dumping the city's hazardous trash along the river as part of what it argued was riverside road project. |
