India’s holy Ganges begins as a crystal clear river high in the icy Himalayas but pollution and excessive usage transforms it into toxic sludge on its journey through burgeoning cities, industrial hubs and past millions of devotees.

Worshipped by a billion Hindus and a water source for 400 million, “Mother Ganga” is dying, despite decades of government efforts to save it.

Lokesh Sharma, a 19-year-old priest in Devprayag, a small hill town where two rivers converge to form the Ganges, is his family’s fourth generation to lead riverbank prayers.

“I never thought of going somewhere else and settling. Devprayag is a heaven for me. I feel blessed to be born next to Mother Ganges,” Sharma said, as chanting priests and devotees, some bottling the water, dunk themselves in the fast-flowing river.

Thousands of Indians immerse themselves and idols of their gods every day, believing a dip in the Ganges absolves a lifetime of sins. People drink the water and use it for crops.

But the pristine waters soon becomes a distant memory as the 2,525 km-long (1,570 mile) Ganges snakes its way down to the densely populated plains of north India, where too much water is sucked out to maintain a healthy flow.

Sliding under bridges in the industrial city of Kanpur, the water’s colour turns dark grey.

Industrial waste and sewage pour in from open drains, as clouds of foam float on its surface.

At one stretch, the river turns red.

Nearby, tannery workers haul chemical-soaked buffalo hides into huge drums. The filthy run-off is dumped in the river.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has pledged to build more treatment plants and move more than 400 tanneries away from the river, but his $3 billion clean-up plan is badly behind schedule.

Less than a quarter of an estimated 4,800 million litres of sewage that flow daily into the river from main towns and cities is treated.

POLLUTION-FREE PRAYERS

The sorry state of the Ganges is most keenly felt in Varanasi, the ancient and most holy of cities for Hindus.

Religious students practise yoga, pilgrims seek spiritual purification and families cremate their dead by the water’s edge, scattering ashes so that souls go to heaven and escape the cycle of rebirth.

Along the bathing ghats, prayers invoking followers to keep the Ganges clean fill the hot evening air.

“I remember earlier the water was very clean and we could drink it,” said 58-year-old boatman Anil Sahni. “Now you can’t even bathe in it.”

As the river widens it curves southwards, towards the Bay of Bengal, passing thousands more villages and swelling cities.

In the 14-million strong metropolis of Kolkata, people bathe and brush their teeth next to towering mounds of rubbish. On the outskirts, brick kilns and factories line the river banks.

Downstream, a packed ferry sets off for Sagar Island, or Ganga Sagar, a magnet for Hindu pilgrims that marks the point where the Ganges meets the sea.

“I feel sad about what’s happening around us. The Ganges is getting dirty day by day but nobody cares. Not even its children,” said 66-year-old priest Ashok Kumar in Mirzapur, a riverside carpet and brass ware hub.

“The Ganges is our mother. There won’t be any future if she dies.”

The canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta on Sunday will be  the culmination of a process – sometimes called “the saint-making machine” – that is long, complex, expensive, opaque and often contentious.

The Catholic Church posthumously confers sainthood on people  considered so holy during their lives that they are now believed to be with God and can intercede with him to perform miracles. Such is the status of the nun acclaimed for her work in the slums of the Indian city now known as Kolkata.

But the path to sainthood is often more bureaucratic than beatific.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 and the late Pope John Paul, who met her often, bent Vatican rules to grant a dispensation allowing the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five.

He had even considered making her a saint immediately but cardinals convinced him that it would set a dangerous precedent for the future, even though in the early Church people were acclaimed saints upon their death.

The current process, known as a “cause”, begins at the local level when a diocese believes that someone in their community lived a saintly life. When it is formally open, he or she get the title “Servant of God.”

The postulator, in this case Canadian priest Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, sends voluminous documentation to the Vatican, where its Congregation for the Causes of Saints assigns it to a “relator”. The relator oversees it, and together with theologians, recommends if it is worthy enough to continue.

If it does, the candidate gets the title “venerable”. The next step is beatification. This requires a miracle, which is usually the inexplicable curing of a sick person.

The first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, and which allowed the Church to beatify her, concerned an Indian woman, Monica Bersa, whose stomach tumour is said to have disappeared after she and others prayed to the nun in 1998, a year after Mother Teresa died.

A medical commission working with the Vatican reviews each case to decide if there is any known medical explanation for the healing.

MIRACLE OR MEDICINE?

Critics, such as the late atheist writer Christopher Hitchens, who made a documentary called “Hell’s Angel” on Mother Teresa, say the system is flawed. One of the doctors who treated Bersa at the time, Ranjan Mustafi, told Indian media the healing was a result of treatment.

After beatification, which for Mother Teresa was in 2003, a second miracle is required in order for the cause to move on to sainthood.

This involved Brazilian Marcilio Andrino, who the Church says unexpectedly recovered from a severe brain infection in 2008 after his family prayed to Mother Teresa.

The saint-making process has not been immune to corruption and mismanagement, with accusations that the system allowed for favouritism for causes with rich backers.

The conservative Opus Dei group was accused of using its considerable financial clout to push for the canonization of its founder, Father Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, who was declared a saint in 2002.

In 2015, a commission looking into Vatican finances found that the Vatican’s saint-making office had little or no documentation of funds used by postulators. According to a Vatican source, the Vatican bank in 2014 froze about a million euros in suspect funds held by postulators.

Kolodiejchuk said the cost of Mother Teresa’s sainthood cause – gathering documentation, interviewing witness, paying lawyers – came to less than $100,000 – very low compared to the cost of some canonisations in the past.

He said it was covered mostly by a single anonymous donation, that costs were contained because member of the Missionaries of Charity worked for free and that no contributions destined for the poor were diverted

Last year, Pope Francis made key changes to the financial side of saint-making with a decree ordering new controls on its costs and demanding more vigilance and transparency at each stage.

It stipulates that contributions from the faithful and groups must go into an account  managed by an administrator who must “scrupulously respect the intentions” of contributors, keep detailed documentation, and present budgets to a superior.

This article was reproduced from Reuters and the views here do not represent the views of Faith Matters