In West Marin, where many residents promote the idea of "sustainability," proponents of a sewage-treatment system that uses little more than algae ponds and sunlight have only been disappointed when advocating its use by local school districts, subdivisions, or dairy ranches.

But in India, the world's largest democracy with more than 800 million people, government officials are close to building an Advanced Integrated Pond Wastewater System in Banaras, one of the oldest cities in all civilization and one of the most sacred places along the Ganges River.

At 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra, a Banaras holy man as well as a hydraulic engineer, is scheduled to talk about his experience in bringing the algae-based pond system known as AIWPS to India.

For the past four years, Mishra has been working with Dr. William Oswald of UC Berkeley, the inventor of AIWPS technology, to design a system that would help purify the Ganges River, a heavily polluted yet deeply revered waterway for members of the Hindu faith.

Among Dr. Oswald's former clients are the Lagunitas School District and French Ranch developers. In 1997, at one of the largest public meetings ever held at the Woodacre Improvement Club, Oswald was lambasted by San Geronimo Valley residents for designing what he then described as a "jewel of a system."

His protégé, Dr. Bailey Green of UC Berkeley, designed an AIWPS system for the Kehoe dairy on Pierce Point. Despite pledges from the Marin County Resource Conservation District, the Point Reyes National Seashore, and the university to help finance the project, the parties raised less than two-thirds of the estimated $415,200 to build it.

In working with Mishra, however, the Berkeley engineers have designed their largest AIWPS system to date, with 32 ponds proposed to treat city sewage that would otherwise flow directly into two tributaries of the Ganges. It is estimated the Banaras system will cost as much as $15 million to build, said Mishra.

Mishra, who inherited leadership of the Sankat Mochan temple in Banaras and is honored as the descendent of a Hindu saint, has nothing but praise for the Berkeley engineers and their AIWPS technology.

"AIWPS will be the most appropriate solution for the future," he said Tuesday. "It has been Dr. Oswald's life work to observe the activities of algae. He has used it very wisely, and he has used it in a very practical way to clean up wastewater."

One advantage of AIWPS is that it can treat sewage without electricity, a benefit for developing countries where power is unreliable. It also treats sewage so completely, using only natural processes, that nearly pure water would be returned to the Ganges River without producing any hazardous byproducts, Mishra said.

Referring to the river as Ganga, Mishra said it has long served as a unifying symbol in Indian culture by embodying the three main deities of the Hindu faith: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, who sustains life, and Shiva, who provides happiness in this world.

"The Hindu tradition has many deities, many gods, many religions practices, many philosophies. In this multiplicity, Ganga is one such divine object where all diversities are joined," he said. "Ganga combines all the three gods."

But Ganga has been poisoned by the sewage from over a hundred cities that crowd its river banks. In addition, the corpses of thousands of people and animals are floated into the sacred river for funeral services, the New Yorker has reported.

In addition, nearly 60,000 devout residents of Banaras take a "holy dip" in its waters each day. On religious holidays, as many as 300,000 pilgrims come to Banaras to purify themselves in the Ganges River, as they have done for centuries, Mishra said.

Beyond restoring the ecological health of the Ganges, an AIWPS system in Banaras would help sustain these pilgrims' ancient tradition and faith, Mishra said. "It is the story of human endeavor to bring divinity to earth," he explained. "If Ganga is polluted, and the mother is dead, then the tradition is dead, and the culture is dead."

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