6 years of Namami Gange
- Namami Gange, the rejuvenation programme of river Ganga has completed six successful years.
- The Central Government initiative, launched in June 2014 with a budget outlay of Rs 20,000 crore, has made significant progress in the cleaning and transformation of river Ganga and its tributaries.
About Ganga:
- It is India’s longest river, flowing 2,525 kilometers from the Himalayan Mountains to the Bay of Bengal.
- The river has the world’s second-highest water discharge,
- Its basin is the world’s most densely populated because it hosts more than 40% of the country’s population.
About Namami Gange Programme
- It is an Integrated Conservation Mission for river Ganga
- It has been approved as ‘Flagship Programme’ by the Union Government in June 2014 with budget outlay of Rs.20,000 Crore
- It has twin objectives of effective abatement of pollution, conservation and rejuvenation of National River Ganga.
- The program is being implemented by the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), and its state counterpart organizations i.e., State Program ManagementGroups (SPMGs).
- NMCG is the implementation wing of National Ganga Council (set in 2016)
- The project is split into three segments or targets
- entry-level activities immediate (for visible impact),
- medium-term activities (to be implemented within 5 years of time frame), and 3.long-term activities (to be implemented within 10 years).
Main pillars of the Namami Gange Programme are:-
- Sewerage Treatment Infrastructure
- River-Front Development
- River-Surface Cleaning
- Bio-Diversity
- Afforestation
- Public Awareness
- Industrial Effluent Monitoring
- Ganga Gram
Key achievements under the Namami Gange programme
- A total of 152 sewerage infrastructure projects have been sanctioned in eight States (Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh) till February 2020
- A sewer network of 4,972 Km at a cost of Rs. 23,305 crore along Ganga and its tributaries.
- Out of 152 sewerage infrastructure projects, 46 projects are completed, 75 projects are in progress and 31 projects are at various stages of tendering.
- Creation of:
- 28 river-front development projects,
- 33 entry-level projects for construction, modernization, and renovation of 182 ghats, and
- 118 crematoria.
- River surface cleaning projects at 11 locations to solve this problem.
- In respect of conserving biodiversity, under the Namami Gange programme, several conservation projects have been initiated, namely:
- Biodiversity Conservation and Ganga Rejuvenation,
- Fish and Fishery Conservation in Ganga River, and
- Gange River Dolphin Conservation Education Programme.
- In addition to this, 5 biodiversity centers at Dehradun, Narora, Allahabad, Varanasi, and Barrackpore have also been developed for restoration of identified priority species. * Similarly, Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute and Centre for Environment Education have been initiated for promoting afforestation and forest revival.
- The several firsts under the programme includes:
- Empowering institutional framework for river rejuvenation,
- GIS-based mapping of microbial diversity of river Ganga,
- Real-time water quality monitoring, and
- Scientific afforestation plan along the river.
- To monitor the real-time progress of ongoing projects and performance of completed ones, NMCG has developed and installed a Project Monitoring Tool (PMT).
- PMT captures all important information from aggregated physical and financial progress to activity level information of infrastructure projects.