24/08/2026
This footage is from Jeremy Wade's Mighty Rivers, Episode One, which first aired on Animal Planet on 8 April 2018 and was filmed the year before. It has been re-uploaded and is now being shared as a picture of the Ganga today. It is not. What changed after 2018 is on the public record.
The tannery discharge at Jajmau, Kanpur is precisely what this particular video has documented. A dedicated 20 MLD Common Effluent Treatment Plant at Jajmau is today complete and operational, built specifically for tannery effluent that once reached the river untreated.
In 2017, the year this episode was filmed, Grossly Polluting Industries across the basin discharged a BOD load of 26 tonnes per day. By 2024, that stood at 10.75 tonnes per day, with effluent volume down almost 24 per cent, from 349 MLD to 265.56 MLD.
CPCB's own comparison of polluted river stretches between 2018 and 2025 records the same shift. The Haridwar to Sultanpur stretch in Uttarakhand, rated Priority IV in 2018, carries no polluted stretch designation today. West Bengal has moved from Priority III to Priority V.
On the film's central claim about vanishing fish, 192 lakh Indian Major Carp fingerlings have been ranched into the Ganga since 2017 through CIFRI, and the first countrywide assessment places the Gangetic dolphin population near 6,324, the largest share of it in the Ganga basin, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Predators return where prey returns.
A 2017 frame may document what the Ganga looked like then. It cannot be presented as evidence of what the Ganga looks like in 2026.
This video is misleading.
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