24 yrs, Rs 916 cr later Ganga has only got filthier

The plan for the Ganga will get new life on Monday, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discusses with the chief ministers of four states on ways of rejuvenating the river, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 5, 2009, 24:26:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

The plan for the Ganga will get new life on Monday, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discusses with the chief ministers of four states on ways of rejuvenating the river.

Singh will meet Uttarakhand Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, on this.

Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal are the states through which the river flows.

The WWF (earlier the World Wide Fund for Nature) last year said the river was among the 10 most endangered ones in the world.

The nodal body for rejuvenating the river is the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), of which the Prime Minister is the head.

The items of discussion include imposing a ban on new infrastructure development projects in the river basin, providing additional money for setting up effluent treatment plants, satellite mapping of the river’s length of 1,450 km in India, and a World Bank offer of long-term aid of $1 billion (about Rs 5,000 crore) to clean up the river.

“As the Authority’s decision will be a joint effort of the central and the state governments, it will be strictly enforceable,” said a senior ministry official not willing to be quoted.

“A corpus fund of Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) is likely to be dedicated to save the river.”

Singh had announced the formation of the Authority in February this year with a commitment to provide a fund for “effective abatement of pollution and conservation of the river” and replace the current “piecemeal effort with a holistic one”.

The river is dirtier now than in 1985, when the plan to clean up the Ganga was operationalised.

Between 1985 and 2009, the central government spent Rs 916 crore (Rs 9.16 billion) to clean up the Ganga, slightly less than the amount needed to build a 250 MW power plant.

The river now has much more bacteria because of the increasing discharge of untreated domestic and industrial effluents.

Also the flow of the river has become sluggish at several locations due to dams and growing habitat pressure.

The ministry of environment and forests has taken six months to work out the framework for the Authority to function in.

“If we have to save the Ganga, we need a strong political will to reduce human activity (around the river),” said Supreme Court lawyer MC Mehta, on whose petition in the Supreme Court the government had initiated the Ganga Action Plan in 1985.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Catch every big hit, every wicket with Crickit, a one stop destination for Live Scores, Match Stats, Infographics & much more. Explore now!

Stay updated with all top Cities including, Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and more across India. Stay informed on the latest happenings in World News along with Delhi Election 2025 and Delhi Election Result 2025 Live, New Delhi Election Result Live, Kalkaji Election Result Live at Hindustan Times.