But as Professor Mishra points out, “People don’t bathe in the Thames.” London’s river probably won’t kill you these days, but to conclude that Benares should be satisfied with water quality the same as that of the Thames, into which few people in their right mind would venture, is unimaginative, to say the least.The other wrong assumption is a constant electricity supply Power cuts are a daily affair in Benares. I arrived in the middle of one, and experienced two every day throughout my stay. One occurred while I was walking along the ghats towards Professor Mishra’s temple. I was looking up at the immense grey concrete bulk of one of the pumping stations, taking in the bright lights of the machine room at the top, and the roaring of the pumps, when all the lights cut out and the riverside was plunged into darkness. Slightly muted, the roaring of the engines continued, but according to Professor Mishra, these frequent cuts are disastrous for the scheme’s efficiency.”Whenever power fails,” he told me, “sewage is diverted into the river.

Some of the plants have stand-by diesel generators, but they are not capable of handling the situation when there is a big shutdown in the main pump. During power cuts there is consequently a backflow of raw sewage into the town, a huge quantity.” Townspeople have found sewage surging through their domestic pipes and forming putrid puddles in the street. According to one report, a group of residents was so incensed by what they had to put up with that they made the local water engineer stand up to his knees in a puddle of the stuff for several hours.The Action Plan’s implementation has also been dogged by technical incompetence, which has brought misery and sickness to tens of thousands of peasants on the city’s outskirts. I went to see this for myself in the company of one of Professor Mishra’s assistants, a muscular, betel-chewing young man called Arana Tiwari.

Along with his four brothers, Arana had been employed at the sewage plant until five years ago; angry and upset by what they saw going on there, they began feeding Professor Mishra with inside reports. When their boss learned about it, all five of them resigned.Next morning, Arana, my guide Hori Lal and I set off in Lal’s 36-year- old Hindustan Ambassador (top speed 20mph). Just north of the city, above the narrow, fast-flowing River Varana, is one of the pumping stations finished in 1994 as part of the Action Plan. Now we saw a dense flow of brown sewage cascading from the station through a wide outflow pipe and into the Varana, heading straight for the Ganges. The Varana enters the river downstream – that is to say, to the north, for the flow of the Ganges in Benares is from south to north – of the city, so the bathing ghats and all the other Ganges-based activity of the city proper is unaffected.

But five villages immediately downstream have been drastically harmed by the filthy flow.We drove to the affected villages. The landscape here looks much as the city itself did 200 years ago, when William Hodges drew it for his Select Views in India, the bluff high above the river still densely wooded. But the riverside activities of the villagers gathered here were a gruesome parody of what goes on a mile or so upstream. They flogged their clothes just like the dobi-wallahs on the washing ghats to the south. But the water was black and stinking, and the clothes emerged from the soaking a sullen shade of grey.

“This problem has existed ever since the pumping station was completed in 1993,” one villager told me. “We can’t drink or bathe in it, and our village is infested by mosquitoes.” Forty-five thousand villagers have had their portion of the Ganges poisoned.We struck out inland, following for a while the Great Trunk Road – barely two lanes wide here – which links Delhi with Calcutta and which, along with the Ganges, makes Benares the crossroads of the country. We joined the narrower Panchakroshi Road, the pilgrims’ route that encircles the city, then turned into yet narrower and bumpier tracks between fields of wheat and barley, and orchards of papaya trees, until we came to a fork in the road, where an enormous peepal tree, grey and leafless, seemed still to be stuck in a different season from the flourishing countryside all around.Arana Tiwari jumped out of the car and started pumping away at a galvanised- iron hand pump under the tree, and it was quickly apparent what had gone wrong: after a few seconds, evil-smelling thick black sludge came slurping out of the pump. Nearby, an equally ugly flow of blackened water rushing along an open canal – supposedly destined to irrigate the fields and water the cattle – told the same story. Due to mistakes in the implementation of the Ganga Action Plan, the countryside around Benares is being polluted.