The CAG rap on Ganga’s pollution may be futile
To clean the Ganga, the State must start with rejuvenating and cleaning the tributaries that feed the mighty river
Afew years ago, I was in Varanasi for a short visit with a set of friends who swear by the place. After “soaking up the city”, as a friend loves to put it dramatically, we decided to do a touristy thing: A boat ride along the Ganga. As we slowly moved from one ghat to another — stinking refuse of the city floating past us and children swimming next to them, nonchalantly — another boat with three Japanese tourists and their guide went past ours. Soon enough, the tourists took out their fancy pocket cameras and started clicking furiously: Not the sunset, not the ghats, but the filth in the river and the two open cremations on the riverbank. The guide was undaunted by all this: He continued to regale them with stories of what the Ganga means to Indians and so on , but I think it was all lost on them: the tourists were more moved by the present condition of the river than its historicity.
It’s really surprising that a country that views the Ganga as a some kind of a religious entity, has failed so spectacularly to keep it clean. There is no point blaming successive governments only; citizens are equally to blame. There has been no dearth of plans and funding to clean up the river.
But now it seems we have a new (strange) problem at hand: the State has even lost the capacity to plan and spend the money meant to rid the river of pollutants. In a report, the Comptroller and Auditor General has said The National Mission for Clean Ganga “could not utilise any amount out of the Clean Ganga Fund”, which meant that the entire amount of Rs198.14 crore (March 31, 2017) was lying in banks. Slamming the Centre for inaction, the CAG said the mission “could not finalise the long-term action plans even after more than six-and-a-half years of signing of agreement with the consortium of Indian Institutes of Technology”. In February, the National Green Tribunal had rapped State agencies for “only wasting public money” in the name of the cleaning project.
To clean the river, spending on Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) won’t be enough; the State has to ensure that the flow of the river is intact. According to the Namami Gange Mission, rejuvenation implies restoring the “wholesomeness” of the river and that includes three things: Aviral dhara (continuous flow), nirmal dhara (unpolluted flow) and ecological and geological integrity. Yet the State it seems is overly focused on ‘nirmal dhara’ but not ‘aviral dhara’, forgetting that nirmal dhara is only a subset of aviral dhara, not the other way round. To ensure that there is aviral dhara, the focus cannot be only on the main river but also on the smaller rivers, which feed it. The main problem with the STPs was not only that they could not cope with increasing pressure, but also bad maintenance. Is it surprising then that we are back to square one on the Ganga cleaning mission?