Ganga has been declared as the national river today by the Prime Minister and he has also announced the Ganga River Basin Authority to be set up wholly for the purpose of empowered planning, implementing and monitoring the river.

India declared the river Ganges, as the country's first national river on Tuesday (November 04) with a separate authority to monitor its cleanliness.

AFTER SPENDING crores of rupees and experiencing the failure of various action plans formulated to clean up the Ganges consistently for several years, the government has finally woken up to the futility of these exercises and as a path breaking initiative, the Prime Minister gave to the nation a ’Chatt gift’ by declaring the River Ganga as a national river today. 

Ganga River Basin Authority would be set up as an empowered planning, implementing and monitoring authority for the river as declared by the Prime Minister. The proposed Authority would be chaired by the Prime Minister and would have as its members, the chief ministers of the states through which the Ganga flows. 

This news will indeed gladden the hearts of millions of people in this country because the sacred river has a special place in the hearts and minds of all the Indians. The Prime Minister emphasised that this emotional link needs to be recognised and the country should set up a model for river cleaning through new institutional mechanism. It seems that the government finally recognised that there is a need to replace the current piecemeal efforts taken up in a fragmented manner in select cities with an integrated approach that sees the river as an ecological entity and addresses issues of quantity in terms of water flows along with issues of quality. 

The details of the Authority to be vested with appropriate powers would be worked out in consultation with the state governments and the Central ministries. The unit of planning should be the river basin and action related to pollution abatement, sustainable use of water and flood management should be integrated. The proposed Authority will promote inter sectoral coordination for comprehensive planning for the river. Various agencies working on different aspects of river conservation and pollution management would be brought together under this proposed Authority. 

Prime Minister also directed that detailed final proposals may be prepared within two months after necessary wide ranging consultations. It was also recognised that the spirit of the Ganga Action Plan as conceived in 1985 by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of making the cleaning for the Ganga River a people’s movement should be restored.

The decision to this effect holds special significance because this very government had overturned the River Interlinking project mooted by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Suresh Prabhu. Other major infrastructure projects were also either renamed or completely abandoned. Now if this apolitical decision is implemented vigorously and the Ganga Expressway too fructifies as declared then it would herald a new beginning.

Nearly 88 per cent of the pollution originates in 27 cities located along the banks of River Ganga and its tributaries. 

Industrial effluents account for a quarter of the entire rubbish being thrown and pumped into these rivers. 

Domestic and industrial pollution, combined with deforestation, use of pesticides and fertilisers and other factors, have rendered the water of River Ganga unfit for drinking. 

According to environmentalists, one of the major causes of polluting the river is the cremation of human bodies on the banks of the river, the practice of throwing dead bodies and immersion of flowers and other articles into the Ganga after religious rituals.