Bow to ganga's need don't waste money

Bow to ganga's need don't waste money

The National Green Tribunal's stinging 543-page judgement on the state of the river Ganga should not come as a surprise. Perhaps it is the evocative nature of the Ganga that compels successive governments to spend ever larger sums of money on cleaning the river, only to fail. While the tribunal's increased penalties and strictures are welcome, cleaning the Ganga will call for a radical change in approach. The focus must be on the river basin, an ecosystem of its own, and a basin-wide policy across the five states through which the Ganga flows. The local, state and central governments must work in tandem: what one does impacts the rest. Without coordination, any project of cleaning the Ganga will be a Sisyphean task. A ministerial group headed by Nitin Gadkari put the Rs. 80,000 crore project cost at about.
The first step would be to end discharging raw municipal and domestic sewage and industrial effluents into the river. Every day, some 7,300 million litres of sewage is generated along the main stem of the Ganga, while capacity exists only to treat about 2,126 million litres per day. Nearly 1,200 million litres per day is under construction, but to treat all effluents, the private sector must be induced to invest in treatment capacity, with carrot and stick. The flow required to preserve Ganga's biodiversity must be determined, and water entitlements apportioned among the riparian states, covering hydroelectric projects on the 400-km stretch in Uttarakhand, whose profusion has depressed the river's flow.
Cleaning the Ganga is no easy task. But if the government does not adopt an approach focused on the sources of the pollutants, fails to institute a scientifically determined usage and water-apportionment policy, it is doomed to repeat past mistakes, leaving the Ganga to its soiled sorrow.