Tanneries, pollution, and water quality in the Ganges in Kanpur, India: a stochastic analysis

Water quality in the Ganges River in Kanpur, India, is the result of two opposite factors. The positive factor arises from the regulations that compel tanneries to treat their wastewater before this water is discharged into the Ganges. The negative factor stems from cheating, bribery, and non-compliance by some tanneries which leads to the dumping of insufficiently treated wastewater into the Ganges. We shed light on two goals by analyzing a stochastic model of Ganges water quality that is the outcome of the above two factors. Our first goal is to study the probabilistic evolution of water quality in the Ganges and to then compute the likelihood that water quality will improve to an exogenously specified level denoted by Q . Our second goal is to ascertain the expected amount of time it will take for water quality to get to this level Q and to then discuss related issues.