Ganga to be acknowledged as National River

The symbol of India’s age-old culture and civilization, the holy river Ganga will soon be endorsed as the ‘national river’. The decision was taken during a review of the Ganga Action Plan in a meeting on Tuesday chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to declare the Ganga, a national river and set up a high-power Ganga River Basin Authority entrusted with planning, implementing and monitoring projects for the river.

The Authority will be chaired by the Prime Minister, and its other members will be the chief ministers of the states through which the Ganga flows — Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

The Prime Minister also directed the detailed final proposals be prepared within two months following the wide-ranging consultations.

The details of the Authority to be vested with appropriate powers will be worked out in consultation with State governments and Central Ministries of Water Resources, Environment and Forests, and Urban Development. The Authority will draw its powers from the Environment Protection Act.

The Authority will promote intersectoral coordination for comprehensive planning for the river and various agencies working on different aspects of river conservation and pollution management would be brought under this umbrella.

Dr. Singh insisted that the current piecemeal efforts taken up in a fragmented manner in select cities must be replaced with an integrated approach that saw the river as an ecological entity and addressed issues in terms of quantity and quality of water.

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.

Referring special place the Ganga has in the hearts and minds of people, Singh said the spirit of the Ganga Action Plan conceived in 1985 by the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to reduce the pollution load on the river Ganga and making the cleaning of the Ganga a people’s movement should be restored.