About the Ganges River
Cool Stuff To Know
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The Ganges is 1557 miles long (2506 km)
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The Ganges Valley, or basin, is 200 to 400 miles (322
to 644 km) wide
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The river starts in an ice cave on the southern slopes
of the Himalayas, some 10,300 feet (3,140 meters) above sea level.
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It flows eastward and empties into the Bay of Bengal.
Its mouths forms a vast delta. At the delta it is joined by the southward-flowing
Brahmaputra River. Their combined delta is the largest in the world
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The delta begins more than 200 miles (322 kilometers)
from the Bay of Bengal and lies mostly in Bangladesh. It is largely a tangled
swampland
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There are two major dams on the Ganga. One at Haridwar
diverts much of the Himalayan snowmelt into the Upper Ganges Canal, built
by the British in 1854 to irrigate the surrounding land. This caused severe
deterioration to the wateflow in the Ganga, and is a major cause for the
decay of Ganga as an inland waterway
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The other dam is a serious hydroelectric affair at Farakka,
close to the point where the main flow of the river enters Bangladesh,
and the tributary Hooghly (also known as Bhagirathi) continues in West
Bengal past Calcutta. This barrage, which feeds the Hooghly branch of the
river by a 26 mile long feeder canal, and its water flow management has
been a long-lingering source of dispute with Bangladesh,
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Sheer volume of waste - estimated at nearly 1 billion
litres per day - of mostly untreated raw sewage
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Also, inadequate cremation procedures contributes to a
large number of partially burnt or unburnt corpses floating down the Ganga,
not to mention livestock corpses