The holy river Ganga passing through five states, is one of the most polluted rivers. Over exploitation and Abstraction of water for various purposes coupled with direct discharge of untreated wastewater has completely deteriorated the quality of water. In comparison to other pollutants, industrial effluents are the most dangerous threat to the natural ecosystem of the Holy river. The paper focuses on Tannery industry which is categorized as red-category industry. These tanneries no longer use environment-friendly vegetable dyes for tanning leather they instead use highly toxic chromium which is discharged directly into the river untreated. The paper has also tried to explain the effects of the pollutants on the environment and the natural ecosystem of the river and suggested to adopt some innovative measures like generation of biogas from the waste, adopting phyto-remediation technology and development of integrated plan for waste water disposal and treatment.
River Ganga, Abstraction, pollution, tannery, industrial effluents, chromium, biogas, phyto-remediation, integrated plan
