The World Bank has agreed to loan India $1 billion to help clean the Ganges river, sacred to hundred of millions of Hindus and also one of the most polluted rivers in the world.
“The bank would be honored to help and support India’s renewed endeavour to revitalize this uniquely important river,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick said.
The loan to clean up the 1,550-mile (2,490 km) river will be spread over the next five years, he said in a statement released late Wednesday.
Scientists say massive amounts of human and chemical waste have devastated the river, which spills from a Himalayan glacier and cuts through India’s plains before flowing into the Bay of Bengal.
Earlier this year the Indian government set up a National Ganga River Basin Authority as part of a plan to ensure that by 2020 no untreated sewage or effluents will be discharged into the river. The government estimates that nearly $4 billion will be required to meet the target.
More than 350 million people across several Indian states live in the river’s watershed.
This is not the first time that officials have launched an ambitious plan to clean the massive river.
In the late 1980s, the government launched a Ganges Action Plan and spent $300 million over the next two decades but achieved little.
Keywords: Ganges, Cleaning programme, World Bank,
Salvaging the Ganges
Comments:
Wow. Government does wake up. I wish to bath in clean Ganga water in my lifetime.
PS: IIT BHU Varanasi has a Ganges river laboratory dedicated for this purpose.
that is great that world bank has shown inerest in cleaning the ganga,
but now the question remains unanswered that ,whether Indian Government will be able to harness it
Exciting but hopeless as it was in 1980s the then PM Rajiv Gandh had made Ganga Action Plan and spent a lot of money but the result was zero.
Hope we will be able to take bath in a clean Ganga in few years!
It is truly a shame that we have allowed billions of gallons of human waste and affluent from leather and other industries to turn nectar into poison. We will have to face the consequences for treating Ganga like this. Also, we let all the Ganga water go into the sea. Why can't we come up with a plan similar to lock & dam system built by the US Army Corp of Engineers in the USA. I was talking with someone in Pittsburgh and was intrigued to know that Mon River (just before it becomes Ohio River) in early 1900s used to have so little water in summers that you could actually walk across it. Thanks to USACE and good planning, this river is now flowing full to the brim , with water depth probably exceeding 25 ft.