Indoor Chhath, thanks to water pollution

On Thursday evening, Nitish Parashar, 28, stood near a large vessel full of water he had kept on the terrace of his home and prayed to the setting sun. “It’s the penultimate day of the four-day Chhath festival. The Yamuna is so polluted, you cannot even go there,” says the marketing executive in South Delhi’s Lado Sarai.

Chhath is also about cleanliness and caring for rivers ponds, lakes and canals where the prayers are offered. But with rapid urbanisation and rising pollution, families are forced to complete the rituals at artificial water bodies. And the festival is no more limited to Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh. About 40 lakh people from this region called Poorvanchal live in Delhi alone.

Similar stories are heard from other cities as well. Nalin Pandey and his family also offered the arghya on their building premises in Mumbai’s Nerul. For the last two years, they have been avoiding a nearby lake due to filth and overcrowding. “On our premises, there is a water fountain, placed in a way that both setting and rising suns can be seen from there,” says Pandey, head of a shipping company.

Chhath begins from the sixth day of Diwali. The first day …read more