PM Modi’s gifts to be auctioned to raise funds for Ganga mission

Beginning Wednesday, some 450 gifts received by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at home and abroad will be auctioned over three days in his home state of Gujarat to raise funds for the government's ambitious Clean Ganga mission.

Updated on: Feb 18, 2015, 09:49:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Beginning Wednesday, some 450 gifts received by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at home and abroad will be auctioned over three days in his home state of Gujarat to raise funds for the government's ambitious Clean Ganga mission.

"All the gifts received by the PM were duly deposited in the toshakhana (treasury). Just as he auctioned gifts during his tenure as Gujarat chief minister for educating the girl child, the Surat auction will spread awareness about the need to clean the Ganga," a senior official said.

The proceeds from the auction of PM's gifts will be deposited with the Namami Gange (obeisance to Ganga) fund, with more such events planned in other parts of the country.

The fund is part of the Clean Ganga Mission announced by Modi in September and is part of the Integrated Ganga Conservation Mission set up with seed money of Rs 2,037 crore.

The auction organised by the Gujarat government in Surat will also see CM Anandiben Patel's gifts go under the hammer.

Standing on the banks of the holy river in Varanasi, which he represents in the Lok Sabha, the Prime Minister had promised to clean the Ganga which successive governments have failed to do after spending hundreds of crores of rupees.

On May 22, four days before he left for Delhi to be sworn in as the PM, Modi donated Rs 21 lakh from his personal savings towards creating a fund to educate the daughters of drivers and peons employed with the government. In his 13 years as Gujarat CM, Modi raised Rs 95 crore for the girl child.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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