“The first time I contested, in 2014… I felt that Mother Ganga had called me here (to Varanasi). But now, after ten years, I feel that… (dramatic pause) Mother Ganga has adopted me.”
“The bond between Kashi (Varanasi) and me is like that between a mother and her son.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said these words in an ‘exclusive interview’ he gave to a news house on May 7. A week later, on May 14, he repeated the same words in another interview with yet another news channel. Modi went as far as to say that after he lost his biological mother, river Ganga was his mother now.
Before he filed his nomination papers in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh that day, Modi performed an elaborate Ganga aarti. The adopted son prayed to his river mother donned in an immaculate white suit, reverently dropping pink flowers into the dark green, algae-ridden waters of a barely flowing Ganga.
“I will do a Ganga aarti and show you that the solution to global warming that the whole world is so worried about lies in nature worship,” he said in one of his exclusive interviews.
But despite the prime minister’s touching devotion for his river-mother, his launch of the much-touted Namami Gange programme in 2014 and pumping in almost Rs 40,000 crore during the course of his ten-year governance, the Ganga still runs dark, its water undrinkable. The river hasn’t gotten much cleaner, say both locals and experts. Sewage treatment plants that have been installed are not doing an efficient job; many are not even functional even though they exist on paper, per several reports. And activities such as sand mining, dredging and tourism (that continue unregulated), as well as projects in the pipeline such as river-linking, are adversely affecting the river in several ways, experts told The Wire.
Namami Gange: Ten years on
The Ganga – one of India’s longest rivers, and one that supports a population of around 400 million by one estimate – has been the target of cleaning programmes since the mid 1980s, due to the sewage and industrial effluents that find their way to the river. As per a 2020 government estimate, 2,953 million liters of sewage is generated by 97 towns along the Ganga, and flows into the main stem of the Ganga everyday.
While the first Ganga Action Plan, which implemented 260 schemes on the main stem of the Ganga, was initiated in 1985, the National Ganga River Basin Authority, under which ‘Mission Clean Ganga’ was initiated came into force in 2009. Its objectives involved addressing wastewater management, solid waste management, industrial pollution, and river front development along the Ganga. The authority was dissolved in 2016, after the Union government constituted the National Ganga Council.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led union government launched the Namami Gange programme in 2014 as part of the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) under the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation.
And much money has flowed for Namami Gange since its inception.
The Minister of State for Jal Shakti, Bishweswar Tudu, told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on February 8 this year that until December 31, 2023, 457 projects had been taken up under the Namami Gange programme at a cost of Rs 38,438.05 crores. Of these, only 280 have been completed and “made operational”. Most of these projects pertain to construction of sewage infrastructure – such as sewage treatment plants or STPs – the minister said in the statement.
Indeed, as far as the nearly Rs 40,000 crore is concerned this is mostly related to the construction of STPs and sewers and river infrastructure such as river bank ghats and so on, said water activist and expert Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP).
“The objective of these wasn’t to improve the status of the river, or river flow. It was only to tackle the sewage flowing into the river. Even if you look at that limited objective, the whole emphasis has been on money, infrastructure and some on technology. But nothing addresses the issue of governance,” he told The Wire. “You can put in as much money, technology, or install as much infrastructure as you want to, but if that infrastructure doesn’t work as per its objectives and design, it is not going to help.”
The Ganga has a long history of its STPs not functioning; in fact, nowhere are STPs functioning to their designed capacities, not even in Modi’s constituency of Varanasi, said Thakkar. Incidentally, Modi won from Varanasi in 2014, and one of his main promises was to clean up the Ganga.
“Varanasi is also in a pretty bad situation even in terms of the limited objective of treatment of sewage,” Thakkar told The Wire.
No science, no governance
There is also no data which shows that the STPs are actually functioning, Thakkar added. And the information that we do have about the functioning of STPs does not inspire much confidence, he said. “Moreover, smaller and decentralized STPs are a far better option than big, mega-STPs but we are not even considering this option.”
Good governance will ensure that these ideal systems are in place, that they are monitored and that corrective measures are taken whenever necessary, Thakkar said. “Credible, independent, democratic, participatory governance is required at several levels, the STP, city, sub-district, district levels.”
According to him, the government has also not done anything to improve the quantum of flow in the river or its status either; they’ve not even been assessing flow in the river, he told The Wire. All the barrages on the Ganga divert water from the river, and none of them maintain flow in the river.
“The only thing they can claim to have done to maintain weather flow in the Ganga is the October 2018 notification on Ganga e-flows. But it is not based on any science, and not comprehensive.”
To decide on environmental flows based on science, the first thing that needs to be done is define your objective, Thakkar clarified.
“There can be many objectives – to sustain certain social services, environmental services, biodiversity, economic services that the river provides. Then based on those objectives, at different points on the river and in different seasons, you need to estimate how much water is required to achieve this objective. Then you need to ensure that that flow exists. But this has not happened.”
Thakkar accuses that authorities just used a “thumb rule” to decide how much percentage of water should be released from specific projects on the Ganga.
Ganga aarti for global warming?
The lack of science also echoes in Prime Minister Modi’s recent statement in Varanasi on May 14 that he would “do a Ganga aarti and show to the world that is so concerned about global warming that the solution lies in nature worship”.
Worshiping nature may be important, but along with that should come action – which appears to be lacking now. Even monks know that.
Monks at the Matri Sadan in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, for instance, have gone on multiple hunger strikes to ensure that governments and authorities take action to clean up the Ganga. In 2018 at the age of 86, Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand (G.D. Agarwal, formerly a professor in civil engineering at IIT Kanpur who later took up monkhood at Matri Sadan) had already gone on several fasts for the Ganga to protest against the lack of efforts being taken by successive governments to clean the river.
As per reports, Agarwal’s fast in 2009 forced the then United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-led government at the Centre to shelve plans for two proposed dams on the Bhagirathi, a tributary of the Ganga in Uttarakhand; his fast in 2016 forced the Haridwar administration to crack down on illegal mining in the area.
Agarwal began his last fast on June 22, 2018, demanding that the government pass a law to save the Ganga and ensure the free flow of the river. He died on the 112th day of his fast.
“The UPA-led government would at least listen to his concerns and implement the measures he wanted but the NDA government completely ignored him,” Thakkar told The Wire. “They let him die.”
Obstacles interfering with the Ganga’s flow
Though the UN listed the Namami Gange project in 2022 as one of the world’s ten “pioneering” initiatives that are successfully restoring the natural world, experts such as Thakkar were not convinced as The Wire Science reported. Firstly, the UN did not provide details regarding the criteria used to put together the list. Secondly, though huge amounts of taxpayer money has gone into the project, several activities that adversely impact the river and its flow continue unabated, and unregulated.
These include illegal sand mining, riverfront development projects that are being built not to sustain the river but to channelize it and river navigation projects that require dredging the river that further interferes with the river’s flow, Thakkar told The Wire. The list doesn’t end there: river linking projects such as the Ken-Betwa river linking project will spell doom for the flow of the Ganga because it will reduce water flow in the river, Thakkar said. Both the Ken and Betwa rivers join the Yamuna along UP-Madhya Pradesh border, which in turn merges with the Ganga at Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh.
Another concern are river tourism projects, Thakkar said, such as the tent cities in Ayodhya. These uber-luxury properties have been built on the floodplains of the river, he added.
“The government is not even assessing the impacts of such activities on the river,” he told The Wire. “The Ganga is possibly the most worshiped river in the world, and mentioned in many Hindu scriptures and is part of culture. Under the governance of a government that celebrates all this, the scriptures and festivals and prayers, the river is getting worse and worse.”
For a clean Ganga, clean its tributaries too
Experts have also pointed out that the focus on cleaning up the main stem of the river has diverted attention away from the status of the smaller tributaries and streams that drain into the Ganga as it flows through the Gangetic river basin from Uttarakhand, to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. India’s river cleanup drives have failed because the country has focused on major rivers alone, Venkatesh Dutta, professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow told Down To Earth in 2023. Though NMCG programme officers claim that smaller rivers are also being revived now, the ground realities are the same, the professor said. For instance, the Gomti river in Uttar Pradesh had dangerously low dissolved oxygen levels making it impossible to sustain biodiversity, per a report.
Another case in point is the story of the Tilodki Ganga – a stream that flows into the Sarayu also known as the Ghaghara, a tributary of the Ganga that later flows past the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, not far from Varanasi. The brand new Maryada Purushottam Shri Ram International Airport – now renamed as the Maharishi Valmiki International Airport – came up right on the stream and this has caused waterlogging in their village, said Durga Prasad Yadav, a resident of Ganja village near Ayodhya. To make matters worse, a Coca Cola bottling plant discharged untreated effluents into the stream, making it impossible to use its waters anymore for cultivation, reported Down To Earth.
“Farming is our mainstay,” Yadav told The Wire on May 16 this year. “Now we cannot even farm our lands let alone drink the water of the stream.”
In 2019, Yadav filed a case in the National Green Tribunal to fight the pollution of the stream. The green court constituted a Joint Committee to look into the matter. District authorities told the Committee that “steps are being taken to ensure that water flow of the area is not hindered due to extension of the Ayodhya Airport and water flow remains smooth” (as recorded in the NGT order pronounced on November 2023 that The Wire accessed). The state’s Department of Irrigation said that a drain – at the total cost of around Rs 5,500 lakh – would be constructed to ensure zero waterlogging, and that this would be constructed before the Airport becomes operational. The Airport is already operational, but the drain is still being built, Yadav told The Wire.
However, the committee declared that there was no river by the name of Tilodki Ganga in Ayodhya district. Yadav is disappointed.
“This was a nadi [river/stream] which was even mentioned in the Puranas, now the government only recognises it as a nala [canal/drain],” Yadav told The Wire. Yadav says he wants to fight for the recognition of the stream but he is facing pressure from several fronts.
Pollution of water, and the lack of clean water to farm and even drink are all election issues in the region, but nothing is being done, Yadav said.
“What do we do?”
Local activists trying to ensure that governments implement actions to clean the Ganga also know the importance of reviving the Ganga’s tributaries and ensuring they are clean too. V.N. Mishra, president of the Sankat Mochan Foundation (an NGO whose vision is to ensure a clean Ganga), has been vocal about the pollution that the Ganga witnesses, as does its tributaries. On March 6, he tweeted that in most of its segments, the river is “not even fit for bathing”.
As Prime Minister Modi talks of nature worship and Ganga aartis to curb global warming, his river-mother trudges along, wearily along Varanasi, wearing colours that would put his immaculate white suit to shame. A clean, free-flowing Ganga still feels far away and distant, despite funds worth nearly Rs 40,000 crore being pumped into the river to clean it up over the past ten years: ten years during which a son – who claims that Mother Ganga has adopted him – has been at the helm of the country.
(Aathira Perinchery is an independent journalist based in Kerala in southern India. She is a trained wildlife biologist who later took up science journalism. Courtesy: The Wire.)
