Govt’s push to Clean Ganga Mission ahead of 2019 General Election

Ravi S.Singh
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 14

Keeping 2019 General Elections in mind, the Centre has begun to push its flagship ‘Clean Ganga Mission’.

Although the government’s earlier decision was to accomplish the mission by end of this year, it now wants to showcase at least “satisfactory” and discernible progress by the deadline. Sources said Union Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkar would go the extra mile with regard the task, even though “his hands are full with his other portfolios”. 

The mission, implemented through the instrumentality of ‘Namami-Gange Programme’ also seeks to clean Ganges tributaries, including the Yamuna. A sum of Rs 22,238 crore has been allocated for the mission that the NDA government had launched in 2014.

Gadkar inaugurated 20 newly constructed and restored Ghats along banks of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur district, which is notorious for its discharge of effluents into the river from tanneries along the river bank. The ministry has lined projects to tackle pollution from two of Kanpur’s biggest pollution hotspots—Jajmau, which is a source of industrial effluents, and Sisamau, the source of domestic sewage. 

It has also approved 20 MLD Common Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) for Jajmau at an estimated cost of Rs 554 crore (phase-1) for treatment of tanneries. 

’Clean Ganga Mission’ is a project close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s heart. Uttar Pradesh, a major state through which the river flows—also a state where the Prime Minister’s own constituency, the venerated Varanasi, is located—is a crucial state for the BJP: the party won 73 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha in general elections of 2014. The state gave the BJP a landslide victory in last year’s assembly elections to help it form a state government on its own for the first time.

The other Ganga basin states are Trinamool Congress ruled West-Bengal—a state the party covets—BJP-ruled states of Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, and BJP-JD (U) coalition ruled state of Bihar.

West Bengal is a state that the BJP and its ideological parent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are eyeing. BJP’s national president Amit Shah has already declared his party’s target of 22 of the state’s 42 in the general elections in an attempt to upset West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s applecart. Banerjee, the chief of Trinamool Congress, has already projected herself as a possible leader of an anti-BJP front for the general elections.

The central government has sanctioned 221 projects under its Namami Gange scheme for sewage infrastructure, Ghats and crematoria and riverfront development, river-surface cleaning, institutional development, biodiversity conservation, afforestation and rural sanitation. Out of these, 58 projects are claimed completed.