Rapid industrialization and modernization come with their drawbacks. This is evident from the fact that the sacred river of Hindus in India, the Ganges, is losing its sacredness and is seriously threatened by the population explosion of the last 25 years, the government's apathetic attitude and lax industrial regulations. On a regular basis, nearly 1 billion liters of untreated sewage waste is discharged into the river from over 116 cities, 300 towns and thousands of rural localities located on the banks of the Ganga. Another 60 million liters of industrial waste is discharged into the river from numerous industrial plants located along the river banks. The amount of waste has increased alarmingly by more than double in the last twenty years and experts predict a further deterioration of water quality by 100% in the next twenty years. It is a strange irony that Hindus, who constitute the majority of India's population, treat the Ganges river as a holy of holies and also believe in dumping the ashes of the dead which makes the water impure. As a sacramental practice, Hindus cremate their dead on the banks of the river and release the remains of the bodies, in the hope of purification of human sins and a path to heaven for their souls. Apart from this, the sacred river is also a landfill of unwanted or "illegitimate" children, animal carcasses, cattle every year also associated with religious reasons. Therefore, in this pool of half a billion souls, there exists a dichotomy where purification and pollution are intertwined in an unholy marriage. The contamination of the Ganges River and its toxic implications" According to the UNICEF report on the water of the Ganges River, there will be constant competition for water, between farming families and urban dwellers, the environment..... . half of the paper ...... when used for irrigation and harms the people who use it as drinking water. With the enormous rate of population growth in despite the cities located on the banks of the Ganges, the infrastructure for controlling and treating waste have increasingly been inefficient and largely a drag. Nearly four million people now use the river's watershed for their daily activities, including 1.6 million residents Varanasi, where the waters of the Ganges flow. they are the densest and largest. "Recent water samples collected in Varanasi revealed fecal coli numbers of approximately 50,000 bacteria per 100 milliliters of water, 10,000 percent higher than the government standard for safe bathing in rivers." . These alarming statistics indicate the risk of pollutants manifesting themselves in the form of a range of waterborne diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, typhoid and amoebic dysentery.