Ganga action plan

Pollution of the Ganges (or Ganga), the largest river in India, poses significant threats to human health and the larger environment. Severely polluted with human waste and industrial contaminants, the river provides water to about 40% of India's population across 11 states, serving an estimated population of 500 million people or more, more than any other river in the world.

Today, Ganges is considered to be the fifth most polluted river in the world. Raghubir Singh has noted that no one in India spoke of the Ganges as polluted until the late 1970s. However, pollution has been an old and continuous process in the river as by the time people were finally speaking of the Ganges as polluted, stretches of over six hundred kilometres were essentially ecologically dead zones.

A number of initiatives have been undertaken to clean the river but failed to deliver desired results. After getting elected, India's Prime minister Narendra Modi affirmed to work in cleaning the river and controlling pollution. Subsequently, the Namami Ganga project was announced by the government in the July 2014 budget. An estimated Rs 2,958 Crores have been spent till July 2016 in various efforts in cleaning up of the river

The main causes of water pollution in the Ganga river are: the increase in the population density, various human activities (such as bathing, washing clothes, and the bathing of animals), and dumping of various harmful industrial waste into the river.

The river flows through 29 cities with population over 100,000; 23 cities with population between 50,000 and 100,000, and about 48 towns. A large proportion of the sewage water with higher organic load in the Ganges is from this population through domestic water usage.

Because of the establishment of a large number of industrial cities on the bank of river Ganga like Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi and Patna, countless tanneries, chemical plants, textile mills, distilleries, slaughterhouses, and hospitals prosper and grow along this and contribute to the pollution of the Ganga by dumping untreated waste into it. One coal-based power plant on the banks of the Pandu River, a Ganges tributary near the city of Kanpur, burns 600,000 tons of coal each year and produces 210,000 tons of fly ash. The ash is dumped into ponds from which a slurry is filtered, mixed with domestic wastewater, and then released into the Pandu River. Fly ash contains toxic heavy metals such as lead and copper. The amount of parts per million of copper released in the Pandu before it even reaches the Ganges is a thousand times higher than in uncontaminated water. Industrial effluents are about 12% of the total volume of effluent reaching the Ganga. Although a relatively low proportion, they are a cause for major concern because they are often toxic and non-biodegradable.

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Wikipedia