A New Revised Approach to Cleaning the Ganga River
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When Ma Ganga flows, pure it brings prosperity to lands it flows through, otherwise it brings misery to the same lands; the more the pollution, the greater the misery.
The Ganges River
has been the foremost lifeline of Northern India ever since the
disappearance of the Saraswati
River more than three
thousand years ago. Lives of millions depend upon it. However, sadly, it has
become one of the most polluted rivers of the world.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges)
The Ganges was ranked as the fifth most polluted river of the world in 2007. Pollution threatens not only humans, but also more than 140 fish species, 90 amphibian species and the endangered Ganges river dolphin The Ganga Action Plan, an environmental initiative to clean up the river, has been a major failure thus far due to corruption, lack of technical expertise, poor environmental planning, and lack of support from religious authorities.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in his speeches pointed out the sad condition of the Ganges a river sacred to millions. Even before the Lok Sabha elections ended,
he repeatedly mentioned that he would work towards improvement of the river. However
a report in the Times of India today detailed how progress has been slow
despite intense and sincere efforts. The scale of the task at hand is simply
too huge. See,
Revised Approach
Seeing that efforts at cleaning the Ganges
have failed repeatedly over last many decades, a fresh look and a completely
new approach is now proposed in this note. It will yield immediate and
excellent results. This new approach does not involve intensifying
efforts to clean most of the Ganges but rather
involves neglecting most of it.
The approach proposed here is that instead of trying to
clean the entire Ganges in one go, all attention and resources be focused on
just one section at a time, starting from its origin and proceeding downstream.
Once a section has been cleaned to the highest most pristine level of
excellence, only then should one proceed to the next section leaving behind a
monitoring office.
The task of the monitoring office would be to monitor if the
cleanliness is maintained and report violations to a central office for speedy
correction so as to nip the problem in its bud. The monitoring office must have
apparatus for quick inspection by land, water, air and space too and a
laboratory attached to it for analyzing water samples.
Thus the river may be divided in nine such steps
headquartered at the following nine locations.
Haridwar
Kannauj,
Farukhabad,
Kanpur.
Allahabad,
Varanasi,
Patna,
Bhagalpur,.
Pakur
At Pakur, the river Ganges, flowing south-southeast, begins
its diversion branching away of its first distributary, the Bhāgirathi-Hooghly,
which later joins with other tributaries to become the Hooghly River, a
cleaning of which is a separate project of its own.
The present approach is sure to produce results while the
existing one of scattering attention all along the river shall fail. It is the
approach that seems to have been used to restore polluted rivers of Europe to a pristine state as well despite the fact that
they too flow through crowded towns and cities. On the average if each section
requires one year the project would take nine years but from the first year on
some portions will become fully clean. Local and state level efforts to keep
their portions of the river clean may however continue as always all along the
length of the river with identical results as before i.e. leading to more filth.
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