On a crisp February morning along the Assi Ghat promenade, hundreds of students, devotees, and neighbourhood volunteers gathered for the annual Run for Clean Ganga — a flagship community event of the Sankat Mochan Foundation’s Swatcha Ganga Campaign. What began as a modest awareness walk has grown into one of Varanasi’s most visible expressions of public commitment to Maa Ganga.
Participants ranged from schoolchildren carrying hand-painted banners to senior citizens who have watched the river’s condition change over decades. Mahant Prof. Vishwambhar Nath Mishra addressed the crowd before the run, reminding everyone that protecting Ganga is not the work of scientists and courts alone — it is a shared duty of every resident who draws water, prays, and lives beside the river.
More than a symbolic run
The event is deliberately paired with action on the ground. After the run, volunteer teams fanned out across three ghats for a coordinated cleanliness drive:
- Plastic and floral waste removal from ghat steps and the riverbank, with separate collection for compostable offerings.
- Water-awareness stalls where Tulsighat Lab volunteers explained basic water-quality indicators to curious visitors.
- Mothers for Mother pledge — women from local self-help groups signed a community charter to reduce household waste entering nalas.
SMF’s Mothers for Mother initiative has long held that women are natural stewards of the home, the neighbourhood, and the environment. At this year’s run, more than 120 women from ghat-adjacent wards registered interest in ongoing ghat-monitoring and household waste-segregation workshops.
Youth, faith, and civic responsibility
Several university science clubs joined the post-run briefing at the Swatcha Ganga Research Laboratory at Tulsighat. Students learned how weekly sampling at bathing ghats produces the data that supports SMF’s advocacy before municipal bodies and the courts.
“We come for the run because it is about pride in our city,” said one participant from Banaras Hindu University. “But we stay involved because the laboratory shows us that devotion and data can work together.”
“When the people of Kashi rise for Ganga, the whole nation listens. This run is not a festival — it is a reminder that the river belongs to all of us.”
— Sankat Mochan Foundation, Swatcha Ganga Campaign
The foundation invites schools, resident welfare associations, and corporate partners to collaborate on future editions of Run for Clean Ganga. Whether through volunteering, sponsorship of cleanup kits, or support for sewage-diversion advocacy, every contribution strengthens the campaign’s oldest promise: Not a drop of sewage in Ganga.