Foreign explorers to sail 2,444km of Ganga to highlight its pollution woes

In 1992, American adventurer Ann Bancroft, now 59, became the first woman to ski across Greenland while two years later Norwegian explorer Liv Arnesen, 61, racked up a similar record going solo to the South Pole. Today, the two have together floated a novel expedition on new ground — a sailing expedition down the Ganga aimed at finding an actionable solution to its pollution problem.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares to head a mega committee to oversee the clean-up of the Ganga, Bancroft-Arnesen Explore has rounded up eight women — from different countries and professions — for this expedition, which they're calling Access Water. From October to December, the group will be sailing down the 2,444 kilometre run of the river in locally-made rafts and boats, stopping alongside towns and cities to interact and learn from local communities.

In a Skype interview, the explorers say they are excited and jittery about their upcoming expedition because till now the pair has mostly roughed it out in cold, remote parts of the planet. "When I skied alone across Antarctica, I did not see or speak to anyone for 50 days... I felt one with nature. But the idea of meeting millions of people along the Ganga is totally new for us," says Arnesen. The expedition will cover major cities along the way - Rishikesh, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Patna and Kolkata. Bancroft, who grew up along the Mississippi in the US, believes local communities are often the key to conservation wisdom.

"When I was growing up, the Mississippi used to be just as polluted as the Ganga is now. A lot of industrial zones and power plants had been set up along the river and they would dump their waste in it. I still don't eat fish from there," says Bancroft.

"By building parks and other recreational complexes along the Mississippi river, it became accessible to a larger group of people and they became sensitized to its conservation," says Bancroft.

The exploration company is organizing the expedition in collaboration with Sage Foundation, Unesco, P&G and Young Pioneers of China. The other members of the team include a conflict resolution expert from Israel, an engineer from Chile, owner of an aviation company in New Zealand, a Chinese geoscientist, a South African social worker and mountaineer Krushnaa Patil from %India. Patil, 24, who holds the %record for being the %youngest Indian woman to scale Mount Everest, is %the youngest member of this expedition.