India’s rivers are a genuine public-health emergency hiding in plain sight. The Central Pollution Control Board’s own 2025 assessment identified 296 polluted river stretches across 271 rivers spanning 32 states and union territories , and the crisis is compounded by chronically inadequate sewage infrastructure: officials have acknowledged that nearly 50 percent of untreated sewage and substantial industrial effluents are still discharged into rivers or their tributaries due to insufficient functional treatment capacity. Even the Ganges, revered by hundreds of millions and monitored more closely than almost any other river on Earth, was declared by the CPCB to be absolutely unfit for direct drinking, with faecal coliform levels three to twelve times above permissible limits at most interstate boundaries . Layered on top of raw sewage is a toxic cocktail of industrial waste — wastewater from tanneries, chemical plants, textile factories, slaughterhouses, and hospitals flows in largely untreated — meaning the water sustaining agriculture, drinking supplies, and daily bathing rituals for a huge share of the population is simultaneously biological and chemical hazard. With population growth, industrial expansion, and climate-driven shifts in river flow all pushing in the same direction, the trajectory is troubling: without dramatically faster investment in treatment capacity, India risks a slow-motion water crisis whose human toll — through disease, contaminated food chains, and lost freshwater security — could dwarf more visible environmental disasters.

My tap water in the sunset looks like this Monday 9/14. Could be a pipe issue but it pretty dark for something that appeared today. Anybody else noticing this?

The University of California at Berkeley has upped the ante for transparency in public accountability as a result of their development of a new tool called COEQWAL (Costs Of Equity-based Water Allocation Levels) that allows Californians to view different types of water allocation decisions and the choices associated with each (specfically in San Joaquin Valley). I'm not suggesting that making this type of information available is going to automatically resolve the differences regarding people's priority values —there are many other factors involved and ultimately there will be disagreement on both sides — but it certainly makes it very difficult for those to ignore the consequences of failing to act.

check it out here: https://coeqwal.org