The Ganga is the largest river in India (2525 KMS) with an extraordinary religious importance for Hindus. Situated along its banks are some of the world's oldest inhabited cities like Varanasi and Patna. It provides water to about 40% of India's population across 11 states, serving an estimated population of 500 million people or more, which is larger than any other river in the world. Today, it is considered to be the sixth most polluted river in the world. Major reasons of pollution are Human waste, Industrial waste and religious events.

A number of initiatives have been undertaken to clean the river but failed to deliver desired results. After getting elected, India's Prime minister Narendra Modi affirmed to work for cleaning the river and controlling Pollution. Subsequently, Namami Ganga project was announced by the Government in July 2014 budget.

Ganga Action Plan

The Ganga Action Plan or GAP was a program launched in January 1986 to reduce the pollution load on the river. But the efforts to decrease the pollution level in the river were unsuccessful even after spending Rs 9017 million. Therefore, this plan was withdrawn on 31 March 2000. The steering Committee of the National River Conservation Authority reviewed the progress of the GAP and necessary correction on the basis of lessons learned and experiences gained from the GAP phase 2 schemes have been completed under this plan. A million litres of sewage is targeted to be intercepted, diverted and treated. Phase 2 of the program was approved in stages from 1993 onward and included the following tributaries of the Ganges: Yamuna, Gomti, Damodar and Mahananda. As of 2011, it is under implementation.

The failure of the Ganga Action Plan, has also been variously attributed to "environmental planning without proper understanding of the human–environment interactions," Indian "traditions and beliefs," "corruption and a lack of technical knowledge"and "lack of support from religious authorities."

National Ganga River Basin Authority

NRGBA was established by the Central Government of India, on 20 February 2009 under Section 3 of the Environment Protection Act, 1986. It declared the Ganges as the "National River" of India. The chair includes the Prime Minister of India and chief ministers of states through which the Ganges flows. In 2011, the World Bank "approved $1 billion in funding for the National Ganga River Basin Authority."

Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court has been working on the closure and relocation of many of the industrial plants like Tulsi along the Ganges. In 2010 the government declared the stretch of river between Gaumukh and Uttarkashi an "eco-sensitive zone.

Namami Ganga

In the budget tabled in Parliament on 10 July 2014, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an integrated Ganga development project titled 'Namami Ganga' and allocated 𔜼,037 crore for this purpose.

As a part of the program, government of India ordered the shut down of 48 industrial units around Ganga.

But Already, Prime Minister Narendra Modi?s cleanup plan for the Ganges river has come in for criticism from various quarters. The sharpest censure came recently from India?s Supreme Court, which observed that the government?s action plan may not result in a clean Ganges ?even after 200 years.?

The apex court has ordered the government to provide a cleanup plan with stages and a schedule.

Promises to clean the Ganges figured in Modi?s election speeches and in his party?s election manifesto. Soon after coming to power in May, he signaled that the Ganges would be a priority by creating a Ministry for Water Resources, River Development and Ganges Rejuvenation. A flurry of meetings followed. In July, the  government announced ?Namami Ganga,? (in Sanskrit it means ?obeisance to the Ganges?), an Integrated Ganges Development Project, and allocated around $334 million for it. It promised a clean Ganges in three years.

However, little is known about the Ganges project or what it entails.

Modi?s Clean Ganges crusade, while rich in rhetoric, seems parsimonious on details.

The 2,525-kilometer-long Ganges originates in the Himalayas. It leaves the mountains at Rishikesh and hits the plains at Haridwar, after which it snakes eastwards across the plains through India and Bangladesh until it empties into the Bay of Bengal.

Around 37 per cent of India?s 1.2 billion people live in towns and villages along the Ganges. They depend on it for drinking water, irrigation and livelihood, and also turn to it for spiritual sustenance.  The Ganges is worshipped by Hindus. A dip in the Ganges is believed to cleanse one of all sins. Hindus believe that the Ganges?s waters are pure and purifying.

It is at dawn, when the sun is yet to rise, that the Ganges best displays its spiritual side. Flowing lazily through the Indian plains it paints a picture of perfect calm, quite like the millions of Indian meditating on its banks or taking an early morning ritual dip in its waters. Boats filled with pilgrims glide gently over its waters. The sight of little earthen lamps floating on the Ganges is magical, as is the sound of temple bells.

But with sunrise the veil lifts and the mystique is gone, laying bare the stinking sewer the Ganges has become. Stretches of the river are tar-black. Sewage, industrial effluent, human corpses, and animal carcasses have turned the sacred Ganges into a dying cesspool.

The Ganges?s waters are not just dirty, they are toxic. 

Recent studies by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) say that the river is so full of killer pollutants that those living along its banks in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in the country. Conducted by the National Cancer Registry Programme under the ICMR, the study throws up shocking findings indicating that the river is thick with heavy metals and lethal chemicals that cause cancer. According to Deputy Director General of NCRP A. Nandkumar, the incidence of cancer was highest in the country in areas drained by the Ganges and stated that the problem would be studied deeply and with the findings presented in a report to the health ministry.

A fecal coliform count exceeding 50 per 100 ml of water and 500 per 100 ml is considered unsafe for drinking and bathing respectively. For agricultural use, the count must not cross 5,000. But the Ganges?s average fecal coliform count overshoots these limits drastically – as it exits Varanasi, for instance, the count is between 1-2 million per milliliter of water – which means that its water is lethal for drinking, bathing and even irrigation.

Domestic sewage is the primary cause of the Ganges?s contamination. Some 2,723 million liters a day (MLD) of sewage is generated by 50 cities located along the river, accounting for 85 percent of its pollution. As for toxic chemicals polluting the Ganges, tanneries are the main culprit, although pulp and paper mills generate the most waste water.

Environmental experts point out that while addressing the pollution of the Ganges is important, focusing on pollutants alone is not the best approach. "The decrease in water flow in the Ganges has reduced its capacity to purify or dilute its pollutants,

The Ganga is the largest river in India (2525 KMS) with an extraordinary religious importance for Hindus. Situated along its banks are some of the world's oldest inhabited cities like Varanasi and Patna. It provides water to about 40% of India's population across 11 states, serving an estimated population of 500 million people or more, which is larger than any other river in the world. Today, it is considered to be the sixth most polluted river in the world. Major reasons of pollution are Human waste, Industrial waste and religious events.

A number of initiatives have been undertaken to clean the river but failed to deliver desired results. After getting elected, India's Prime minister Narendra Modi affirmed to work for cleaning the river and controlling Pollution. Subsequently, Namami Ganga project was announced by the Government in July 2014 budget.

Ganga Action Plan

The Ganga Action Plan or GAP was a program launched in January 1986 to reduce the pollution load on the river. But the efforts to decrease the pollution level in the river were unsuccessful even after spending Rs 9017 million. Therefore, this plan was withdrawn on 31 March 2000. The steering Committee of the National River Conservation Authority reviewed the progress of the GAP and necessary correction on the basis of lessons learned and experiences gained from the GAP phase 2 schemes have been completed under this plan. A million litres of sewage is targeted to be intercepted, diverted and treated. Phase 2 of the program was approved in stages from 1993 onward and included the following tributaries of the Ganges: Yamuna, Gomti, Damodar and Mahananda. As of 2011, it is under implementation.

The failure of the Ganga Action Plan, has also been variously attributed to "environmental planning without proper understanding of the human–environment interactions," Indian "traditions and beliefs," "corruption and a lack of technical knowledge"and "lack of support from religious authorities."

National Ganga River Basin Authority

NRGBA was established by the Central Government of India, on 20 February 2009 under Section 3 of the Environment Protection Act, 1986. It declared the Ganges as the "National River" of India. The chair includes the Prime Minister of India and chief ministers of states through which the Ganges flows. In 2011, the World Bank "approved $1 billion in funding for the National Ganga River Basin Authority."

Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court has been working on the closure and relocation of many of the industrial plants like Tulsi along the Ganges. In 2010 the government declared the stretch of river between Gaumukh and Uttarkashi an "eco-sensitive zone.

Namami Ganga

In the budget tabled in Parliament on 10 July 2014, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an integrated Ganga development project titled 'Namami Ganga' and allocated 𔜼,037 crore for this purpose.

As a part of the program, government of India ordered the shut down of 48 industrial units around Ganga.

But Already, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cleanup plan for the Ganges river has come in for criticism from various quarters. The sharpest censure came recently from India’s Supreme Court, which observed that the government’s action plan may not result in a clean Ganges “even after 200 years.”

The apex court has ordered the government to provide a cleanup plan with stages and a schedule.

Promises to clean the Ganges figured in Modi’s election speeches and in his party’s election manifesto. Soon after coming to power in May, he signaled that the Ganges would be a priority by creating a Ministry for Water Resources, River Development and Ganges Rejuvenation. A flurry of meetings followed. In July, the  government announced “Namami Ganga,” (in Sanskrit it means “obeisance to the Ganges”), an Integrated Ganges Development Project, and allocated around $334 million for it. It promised a clean Ganges in three years.

However, little is known about the Ganges project or what it entails.

Modi’s Clean Ganges crusade, while rich in rhetoric, seems parsimonious on details.

The 2,525-kilometer-long Ganges originates in the Himalayas. It leaves the mountains at Rishikesh and hits the plains at Haridwar, after which it snakes eastwards across the plains through India and Bangladesh until it empties into the Bay of Bengal.

Around 37 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people live in towns and villages along the Ganges. They depend on it for drinking water, irrigation and livelihood, and also turn to it for spiritual sustenance.  The Ganges is worshipped by Hindus. A dip in the Ganges is believed to cleanse one of all sins. Hindus believe that the Ganges’s waters are pure and purifying.

It is at dawn, when the sun is yet to rise, that the Ganges best displays its spiritual side. Flowing lazily through the Indian plains it paints a picture of perfect calm, quite like the millions of Indian meditating on its banks or taking an early morning ritual dip in its waters. Boats filled with pilgrims glide gently over its waters. The sight of little earthen lamps floating on the Ganges is magical, as is the sound of temple bells.

But with sunrise the veil lifts and the mystique is gone, laying bare the stinking sewer the Ganges has become. Stretches of the river are tar-black. Sewage, industrial effluent, human corpses, and animal carcasses have turned the sacred Ganges into a dying cesspool.

The Ganges’s waters are not just dirty, they are toxic. 

Recent studies by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) say that the river is so full of killer pollutants that those living along its banks in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in the country. Conducted by the National Cancer Registry Programme under the ICMR, the study throws up shocking findings indicating that the river is thick with heavy metals and lethal chemicals that cause cancer. According to Deputy Director General of NCRP A. Nandkumar, the incidence of cancer was highest in the country in areas drained by the Ganges and stated that the problem would be studied deeply and with the findings presented in a report to the health ministry.

A fecal coliform count exceeding 50 per 100 ml of water and 500 per 100 ml is considered unsafe for drinking and bathing respectively. For agricultural use, the count must not cross 5,000. But the Ganges’s average fecal coliform count overshoots these limits drastically – as it exits Varanasi, for instance, the count is between 1-2 million per milliliter of water – which means that its water is lethal for drinking, bathing and even irrigation.

Domestic sewage is the primary cause of the Ganges’s contamination. Some 2,723 million liters a day (MLD) of sewage is generated by 50 cities located along the river, accounting for 85 percent of its pollution. As for toxic chemicals polluting the Ganges, tanneries are the main culprit, although pulp and paper mills generate the most waste water.

Environmental experts point out that while addressing the pollution of the Ganges is important, focusing on pollutants alone is not the best approach. “The decrease in water flow in the Ganges has reduced its capacity to purify or dilute its pollutants,” says Brahma Dutt Tripathi, professor of environmental engineering at the Banaras Hindu University and an expert member of the National Ganges River Basin Authority (NGRBA). Hence attention must be paid to increasing the water flow in the Ganges, he says. This can be done by de-siltation, removing all mid-stream constructions, and halting construction activity along the river’s banks.

While on the one hand the Modi government is calling for rejuvenating and cleaning the Ganges, it is simultaneously talking about developing this river in ways that could undermine the rejuvenation efforts. On the table are plans to build 16 new dams across a 1,600-km long stretch of the Ganges between Varanasi and Hooghly. There are also plans to develop the Ganges as a waterway for commercial activities. Such development activities would kill a river that is already struggling to survive, argue experts, pointing out that the string of 16 proposed dams would convert the Ganges “into 16 huge ponds.”

In this regard, the government’s silence on the entire Upper Ganges Basin is worrying, as this is an area where several hundred dams and hydro-power projects are operational, under construction or in the pipeline,

Attempts to clean the Ganges have been made before. In 1985, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi set up a $226 million Ganges Action Plan. India’s courts have ordered the closure of tanneries polluting the river’s waters. Then in 2009, Mission Clean Ganges was announced and the NGRBA, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was created. It was seen to be an improvement over GAP as its approach was more holistic, focusing on the Ganges Basin rather than a few of Ganges’s riparian cities.

However, the Ganges’s many problems persist and indeed seem to have multiplied.

Building of infrastructure for the treatment of sewage at several points along the Ganges was an important element of GAP. However, much of the sewage treatment infrastructure built at enormous cost lies unused, crippled by power shortages, according to an official in the Central Pollution Control Board.

Yet building sewage treatment plants remains an important component of the Modi government’s plans for the Ganges.

According to Sunita Narain, director-general of the Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment, “A comprehensive solution to the Ganges pollution lies in dealing with three problem areas: one, finding water to dilute and assimilate waste two, finding innovative ways to check the growing amount of untreated sewage discharged into the river and three, fixing the enforcement to stop industries from discharging waste into the river.”

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Israel, have offered their technical expertise to clean the Ganges. But some have raised doubts over the usefulness of the Thames or Rhine cleanup model for the Ganges.

while there is no problem in drawing lessons from what others have done, India would need to adapt foreign solutions to the Indian situation and “not ape blindly.” In cleaning Ganga, India should also learn from their failures as much as from their successes.

Experts emphasize that participation of ordinary people in identifying problems, finding solutions and implementing them is imperative for a sustainable solution to the Ganges’s problems. It requires a bottom-up approach, one in which “communities and common people are involved as key participants, in cases even drivers of the cleanup program,” Dharmadhikary says, stressing that the Ganges cannot be kept clean “unless the millions living in the basin want it to be so, and will participate in not dirtying it in the first place.”

Uless the common people ‘own’ the program, it will not work,

In recent weeks, Modi has called for a “mass movement” to rejuvenate the Ganges. He has said that volunteer teams from across the country would be involved in creating public awareness and performing “Ganga seva” (service).

While mass mobilization on cleaning the Ganges is a step in the right direction, there is a danger that the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, will mobilize along communal lines through appeals to religion and faith. The BJP’s critics have always maintained that the priority it accorded to the Ganges is driven by its Hindutva project.

Ultimately, for India to find a sustainable solution to the problems that afflict not just the Ganges and other rivers as well, it will need more than a mass movement. An approach that includes all communities, irrespective of their faith, will be required." says Brahma Dutt Tripathi, professor of environmental engineering at the Banaras Hindu University and an expert member of the National Ganges River Basin Authority (NGRBA). Hence attention must be paid to increasing the water flow in the Ganges, he says. This can be done by de-siltation, removing all mid-stream constructions, and halting construction activity along the river's banks.

While on the one hand the Modi government is calling for rejuvenating and cleaning the Ganges, it is simultaneously talking about developing this river in ways that could undermine the rejuvenation efforts. On the table are plans to build 16 new dams across a 1,600-km long stretch of the Ganges between Varanasi and Hooghly. There are also plans to develop the Ganges as a waterway for commercial activities. Such development activities would kill a river that is already struggling to survive, argue experts, pointing out that the string of 16 proposed dams would convert the Ganges ?into 16 huge ponds.?

In this regard, the government"s silence on the entire Upper Ganges Basin is worrying, as this is an area where several hundred dams and hydro-power projects are operational, under construction or in the pipeline,

Attempts to clean the Ganges have been made before. In 1985, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi set up a $226 million Ganges Action Plan. India?s courts have ordered the closure of tanneries polluting the river's waters. Then in 2009, Mission Clean Ganges was announced and the NGRBA, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was created. It was seen to be an improvement over GAP as its approach was more holistic, focusing on the Ganges Basin rather than a few of Ganges's riparian cities.

However, the Ganges?s many problems persist and indeed seem to have multiplied.

Building of infrastructure for the treatment of sewage at several points along the Ganges was an important element of GAP. However, much of the sewage treatment infrastructure built at enormous cost lies unused, crippled by power shortages, according to an official in the Central Pollution Control Board.

Yet building sewage treatment plants remains an important component of the Modi government's plans for the Ganges.

According to Sunita Narain, director-general of the Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment, "A comprehensive solution to the Ganges pollution lies in dealing with three problem areas: one, finding water to dilute and assimilate waste two, finding innovative ways to check the growing amount of untreated sewage discharged into the river and three, fixing the enforcement to stop industries from discharging waste into the river."

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Israel, have offered their technical expertise to clean the Ganges. But some have raised doubts over the usefulness of the Thames or Rhine cleanup model for the Ganges.

while there is no problem in drawing lessons from what others have done, India would need to adapt foreign solutions to the Indian situation and "not ape blindly." In cleaning Ganga, India should also learn from their failures as much as from their successes.

Experts emphasize that participation of ordinary people in identifying problems, finding solutions and implementing them is imperative for a sustainable solution to the Ganges's  problems. It requires a bottom-up approach, one in which "communities and common people are involved as key participants, in cases even drivers of the cleanup program," stressing that the Ganges cannot be kept clean "unless the millions living in the basin want it to be so, and will participate in not dirtying it in the first place."

Uless the common people 'own' the program, it will not work,

In recent weeks, Modi has called for a "mass movement" to rejuvenate the Ganges. He has said that volunteer teams from across the country would be involved in creating public awareness and performing "Ganga seva" (service).

While mass mobilization on cleaning the Ganges is a step in the right direction, there is a danger that the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, will mobilize along communal lines through appeals to religion and faith. The BJP's critics have always maintained that the priority it accorded to the Ganges is driven by its Hindutva project.

Ultimately, for India to find a sustainable solution to the problems that afflict not just the Ganges and other rivers as well, it will need more than a mass movement. An approach that includes all communities, irrespective of their faith, will be required.