So far, the government's efforts to clean up India's two major and most-polluted rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna — which runs past the nation's capital, New Delhi — has been more symbolic than practical, critics say.
"The government put in place these action plans two decades ago and now the pollution in the rivers are worse," said Srinivas Krishnaswamy, an energy and climate change expert at Greenpeace in India.
Since the 1986 Ganges Action Plan, the government has spent about US$300 million. Part of that money paid for three sewer treatment plants in Varanasi.
But as Varanasi's population soared past 3 million people, the sewage quickly outpaced the capacity of the treatment plants. Exacerbating the problem are almost daily power outages, for hours at a time, triggering the plants' automatic bypasses that release backed-up, untreated sewage into the river.
"The government's solution is not working," said Mishra, in his office overlooking the murky waters of the Ganges. "Why build electric-powered treatment plants if there's not enough electricity to power them?"
That led Mishra, a Hindu priest and a former head of the engineering department at nearby Benares University, to seek guidance from engineers at the University of California at Berkeley. Together, they devised what they say is a cheaper, more sustainable method of sewage disposal using gravitational flow to collect the sewage into holding pools and sunlight to disinfect it.
Business leaders and ordinary citizens backed the plan, and government officials agreed to consider it, Mishra said. In the nine years since that plan was submitted, nothing has been done.
RSS