VMC and Namami Gange Clear About 100 kg of Clothes From Manikarnika River Bed

After the Ganga’s flood line eased, municipal sanitation workers and Namami Gange volunteers turned on Tuesday to a different mess at Manikarnika — not only silt, but heaps of discarded clothes and polythene left on the river bed and banks.

The Varanasi Municipal Corporation, working with Namami Gange’s Kashi region coordinator and civic cleanliness brand ambassador Rajesh Shukla and his team, collected roughly 100 kilograms of clothes and plastic waste from the Manikarnika stretch. The material was gathered from the exposed bed and adjoining banks and sent for disposal. Corporation sanitation staff were present through the voluntary cleanup.

Shukla’s team has been active on several ghats since the water began to fall, including earlier debris collection at Dashashwamedh that was handed to the Nagar Nigam. Tuesday’s Manikarnika drive focused on clothes that devotees leave behind after bathing or ritual use — a habit volunteers say the flood simply returned to the steps in one dirty pile. Polythene mixed with the cloth made the pickup heavier and harder to sort.

Namami Gange and municipal officers used the drive to repeat a plain appeal: do not leave old clothes, polythene or worship material in the river or on the banks after a bath. The point is practical as much as pious. Once the current drops, the same waste sits in silt, then washes back when the next rise comes, stressing the river’s ecology and the working surface of a busy cremation ghat.

Manikarnika’s upper platforms have continued to handle cremations while lower levels stayed wet through the flood spell. As more of the bed dried, the clothes became visible enough for a concentrated sweep. The 100-kilogram figure is the civic team’s own count of what they lifted on Tuesday, not a seasonal audit of every ghat.

The cleanup sits beside, rather than repeating, the broader silt story already reported from Asi and other upstream steps. Here the headline waste was fabric and plastic on a cremation ghat’s river bed. Civic workers say citizen habit has to match the municipal effort if the next flood is not to dump the same load again.

For now, the Manikarnika bed is a little clearer than it was on Monday. The appeal from Shukla’s team remains the same sentence they have been repeating along the river: keep faith from becoming another bag of clothes in the water.

Manikarnika is not a quiet ornamental ghat. Cremation work, pilgrim traffic and the constant churn of offerings make any cleanup temporary unless habits change. That is why Shukla’s public line stressed citizen duty beside government effort. Clothes left “in faith,” he has argued on earlier drives, come back as pollution when the river rises and falls. Tuesday’s 100-kilogram haul is one day’s evidence of that cycle.

Municipal workers bagged the wet cloth and plastic together for disposal rather than leaving sorted piles on the steps. The timing mattered: only after the flood line dropped could teams walk the bed safely and see how much fabric had settled into the silt. Similar silt-and-waste work is under way or planned on other ghats, including stretches where evening aarti has just returned to lower stairs.

Readers should not confuse this Manikarnika clothes sweep with the separate gauge-and-silt story already filed from Asi and Dashashwamedh. Both belong to the same recession week; the waste stream here was specifically discarded clothing and polythene on a cremation ghat’s river bed. If devotees stop leaving garments in the water, the next recession will leave less for the trucks. If they do not, Tuesday’s count will look small beside the next flood’s return load.