Environment ministry ropes in IITs to manage Ganga basin

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has roped in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to chalk out a plan for managing the Ganga basin.

The report is expected in the next 12-18 months.

“All seven IITs have come together for the first time on a project and will prepare a road map for policy interventions to restore the Ganga. They will work on augmenting its flow and technology improvements in the canal system,” said a ministry official.

This is an extension of a plan developed by the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), set up by the Centre as an empowered planning, financing, monitoring and coordinating agency for the river in 2009.

The authority has decided that under Mission Clean Ganga, flow of untreated municipal sewage and industrial effluents into the river will be stopped by 2020. At present, there is a sewage treatment capacity of about 1,025 million litres per day (mld) as against 3,000 mld sewage being generated in towns along the Ganga. An investment of Rs 15,000 crore will be required over the next years to create the necessary treatment and sewerage infrastructure.

A compendium of sewage treatment technologies has been prepared by IIT-Kanpur and a status paper on Ganga has been prepared by Alternate Hydro Energy Centre, IIT Roorkee, providing an overview of the Ganga basin.

The ministry also plans to set up a project preparation unit in the capital by the end of next month to look into the priority investments that will go into the project. “These units will be set up at the Centre and the state level and will comprise professionals. A project director will be finalised soon,” the official added.

Moreover, MoEF is negotiating a loan of about $1billion (around Rs 4,500 crore) with the World Bank for cleaning the Ganga. The estimated cost of implementing the project stands at $4 billion (around Rs 18,000 crore).

In the first phase, projects worth Rs 1,394 crore have been cleared by the Empowered Steering Committee of NGRBA. These include projects in Uttar Pradesh (Rs 800 crore), Bihar (Rs 440 crore), West Bengal (Rs 105 crore) and Uttarakhand (Rs 45 crore). The project will take up development of sewer networks, sewage treatment plants and sewage pumping stations, electric crematoria, community toilets, river fronts and canals.