Cleaning Ganga Mission
Dr Arvind Kumar
The mission of cleaning River Ganga has almost become a herculean task despite multiple authorities assigned with the task and more than Rs 40,000-crore having been spent on cleaning river Ganga over the past two decades without attaining any tangible outcome. A massive scale of human intervention has destroyed the natural balance of the river and all so-called steps taken so far have apparently failed to contain the levels of pollution. In the Ganga basin approximately 12,000 million liters per day (mld) of sewage is generated, for which presently there is treatment capacity of only around 4,000 mld. Factors like the failure of Ganga Action Plan (GAP), lack of political will, lack of good governance, apathy of business community along with people’s non-involvement are responsible for the miserable plight of Ganga.
The mission of cleaning River Ganga calls for a comprehensive range of solutions that are synergistically supportive of each other. Mere technical and financial inputs are insufficient to tackle the problem which is essentially rooted in the governance crisis and it requires involvement of the civil society at the grassroots level to facilitate capacity building of all stakeholders as being done by New Delhi-based India Water Foundation as a PAPP partner of the JICA-assisted Ganga Action Plan Project at Varanasi (UP).
