New Delhi: The Ganga river is drying up at an unprecedented rate, and it’s going to impact water and food availability for over 600 million people. A new study by the civil engineering department at IIT Gandhinagar has found that from 1991 to 2020, the Ganga’s stream has declined rapidly, with an intensity that is 76 percent higher compared to the severe drought in the 16th century, the closest similar event in history.

The paper, published in the PNAS Journal on 22 September, said that even normal climate variability of the past millennium cannot explain this recent drying up.

“This could probably be the first ever such study conducted for the Ganga – we have taken (streamflow reconstruction) data from the last 1,300 years to reconstruct this history,” said Vimal Mishra, the author o

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