To help environment, a greener method of Hindu cremation
VARANASI, India - Cremation fires crackle all day on the chipped concrete steps of this holy city on the Ganges River, the blazes spewing ash and flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers.
VARANASI, India - Cremation fires crackle all day on the chipped concrete steps of this holy city on the Ganges River, the blazes spewing ash and flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers.
Sweating men stoke the funeral pyres, squinting against the smoke as they lug and stack the logs needed to burn the Hindu dead.
And when the bodies are incinerated and the families have taken away the ashes, the men sweep residue into the river.
Devout Hindus regard cremation as an essential rite that frees the soul, enabling its journey to the next spiritual level. But with India's Hindu population of about 800 million ensuring a massive number of open-air cremations, there is growing awareness that this adherence to orthodoxy carries a toll for the temporal world.
It takes a lot of wood to burn a body: The demand for funeral pyres strips the country of more than 50 million trees annually, according to some estimates. Cremations also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the body parts sometimes dumped into rivers add further toxicity to water that is badly polluted.
"We have come to a stage where if we don't come up with a solution for dealing with the dead, we are going to affect the survival of the living," said Anshul Garg, director of Mokshda, a nonprofit group in New Delhi that is campaigning for an environmentally friendly approach to cremation.
In traditional Hindu cremations, the body is placed atop a pile of wood. The corpse is covered with more wood and burned in the open air. Mokshda says that method requires as much as 880 pounds of wood to burn a single corpse (though the wood porters in Varanasi say the amount is closer to 600 pounds), a process that can take six hours.
The Mokshda alternative is the "Green Cremation System," a cremation bier it developed 15 years ago and has been tinkering with since. The organization believes it has perfected its design, saying it can burn a body using a mere 220 pounds of wood in a third of the time.
Wood is integral to Hindu cremation rites, a symbolic connection between the body and the earth, which is why the first layer of wood is laid on the ground. The Mokshda system's innovation is to place that first layer of wood on a raised metal grate, allowing for better air circulation. A chimney is also placed over the pyre to cut heat loss.
"We have improved the flow of air, and where there is a proper flow of air, your combustion efficiency increases," Garg said. "This is not a new technological gizmo. It's a simplicity, like improving the efficiency of a wood stove."
The Mokshda system has made only tiny inroads so far. It has 12 units of its latest model, which costs about $30,000, in operation, with orders for 80 more. But the potential demand is enormous. The organization has identified 800 crematoriums across India as possible users. The Delhi metropolitan area alone has about 350 crematoriums, their flaky residue occasionally drifting over nearby neighborhoods.
But the Mokshda system faces two obstacles to acceptance. For one thing, improving cremation methods is a low priority for cash-strapped municipalities facing a host of public health issues. An even greater obstacle is the resistance of traditionalists who don't want to mess with a matter as sensitive as the fate of a loved one's soul.
"We have changed other rituals - marriage, eating habits, clothing - but rituals around death are the hardest to change," Garg said. "People are hesitant to talk about death; there is a fear. So they say they'll stick with what they've been following through the ages."
