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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Clean Ganga remains a dream -Purnima S Tripathi

Clean Ganga remains a dream -Purnima S Tripathi

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published Published on Sep 10, 2018   modified Modified on Sep 10, 2018
-Frontline.in

Four years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement of the Namami Gange project, the river remains as dirty as ever.

WHILE in Varanasi to file his nomination papers for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Narendra Modi, then the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial nominee, had declared with his characteristic bravado, “I have not come here on my own. I have been invited by mother Ganga.” He said it was his destiny to serve the Ganga ma and he would do so by cleaning the river in the next five years.

Arguably, this was one promise that must have lit up a billion hearts because the Ganga is revered by Hindus across the globe. The river, which criss-crosses almost half of the breadth of India in its 2,525-kilometre journey, also nurtures almost 40 per cent of the country’s population. Apart from its religious associations, it has huge social, economic and ecological significance for the country. Earlier attempts to cleanse the river had not been successful, though hundreds of crores of public money were squandered away.

Shortly after he took oath as Prime Minister, Modi announced the ambitious Namami Gange project, which involved cleaning the ghats, ridding the river of biological contaminants, improving rural sanitation, and promoting afforestation in the river basin. The works were to be undertaken in the States which straddle the length of the river—Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal. Together, these States were discharging 12,000 million litres a day (mld) of sewage into the river basin, while the treatment capacity was only for 4,000 mld. Treatment for only 1,000 mld was actually operational. Around 80 per cent of the pollution in the Ganga is because of untreated sewerage, and 20 per cent because of industrial pollution from tanneries in Kanpur and sugar and paper mills in Uttar Pradesh.

Four years have passed since Modi’s announcement, and the river remains as dirty as ever. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) 2017 report titled “Performance Audit of the Rejuvenation of River Ganga” revealed deficiencies in financial management, planning, implementation and monitoring, huge delays in approval of projects, huge unspent balances, and failure to achieve 100 per cent target of “Open Defecation Free” villages in the river basin area. These were the prerequisites for cleaning the river.

The report, which was tabled in Parliament, noted that the award of work for sewage treatment plants of 1,397-mld capacity was to be completed by September 2016, but as of August 2017, it was still being worked out. Only 35 of the proposed 86 sewerage treatment plants (STPs), it said, had been completed. The report noted that this meant unusually high levels of faecal coliform in the water. The CAG, which measured the faecal coliform level in Varanasi, said upstream of the river in Varanasi near Assi Ghat, faecal coliform level was 3,000 MPN (most probable number)/100 ml while downstream it increased to 46,167 MPN/100 ml. For water to be considered safe for bathing, the faecal coliform measure should not exceed 500 MPN/100 ml.

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Frontline.in, 14 September, 2018, https://www.frontline.in/environment/article24807488.ece?homepage=true


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