Unholy Chase

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made cleaning of the Ganga again a high priority national agenda. He had the advantage of learning from the failures of the past 30 years in cleaning the national river. And he had the missionary zeal to proclaim a deadline for doing so. A year before his promise of a clean Ganga in 2019, the river is far from being so. In many stretches it is dirtier than before. An analysis by BANJOT KAUR on why the river will remain polluted despite river-friendly budgets and politically correct rhetoric

- Banjot Kaur

RAMJI TRIPATHI took bottles filled with Ganga water to the offices of the Kanpur Jal Nigam and the Ganga Pollution Control Unit to confirm his strong hunch. Tripathi is a seer and the national coordinator of Kanpur-based Ma Ganga Pradushan Mukti Abhiyan Samiti, an outfit led by Swami Harchetan. When he started sprinkling the “holy water ” on the officials, the police was called and he was forced to leave the premises. Tripathi says he did this only to debunk the claims of officials that river-cleaning operations were yielding results. “Why did they stop me from sprinkling holy water,” he asks. His organisation is now going to launch a movement to boycott bathing in the Ganga in the next Kumbh Mela, which begins on January 15, 2019. After three decades of efforts to clean the national river, it is a sad state of affairs that the river is not even fit for bathing. According to a map of Ganga river water quality presented by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to National Green Tribunal (NGT) in August 2018, only five out of 70-odd monitoring stations had water that was fit for drinking and seven for bathing (see ‘The filthy stem’, p20-21).

Initiatives to clean the Ganga began with the Ganga Action Plan I in 1986. Till 2014, over 4,000 crore had been spent. But the river has remained dirty. So when the National Democratic Alliance government launched the Namami Gange in mid-May 2015, there was a new hope. It was the biggest-ever initiative—over 20,000 crore was allotted. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it his personal agenda and set a dead line: “Ganga will be clean by 2019”, it has now been extended to 2020.