NGT orders to submit progress report of Clean Ganga Mission

NewsBharati    16-Oct-2017
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New Delhi, October 16: The National Green Tribunal has directed the Centre and Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand governments to file affidavits about steps they have taken to comply with its directions to clean the Ganga in the stretch between Gomukh and Unnao.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar also asked all the stakeholders to explain the course of action they propose to take in relation to Phase-2 from Kanpur to the UP border. The matter is listed for next hearing on 24th of this month.

The green panel, in a detailed judgement, had passed a slew of directions to rejuvenate the Ganga, declaring as ‘No Development Zone’ an area of 100 metres from the edge of the river between Haridwar and Unnao and prohibiting dumping of waste within 500 metres from the river.

The tribunal had earlier, in a detailed judgement, said the government has spent over Rs 7,000 crore in two years to clean the Ganga which still remains a “serious environmental issue”.

Now under Namami Gange 173 projects are going on. The projects include activities like sewage infrastructure, river front development, ghat and crematoria, ghat cleaning, river surface cleaning, afforestation, and biodiversity conservation and rural sanitation. 41 projects have already been finished.

Notably, Ganga, the sacred river to Hindus, has been found to be the second-most polluting river in the world, discharging 115,000 tonnes of plastic each year, as per a recent study. The researchers at The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch foundation developing new technologies for ridding the oceans of plastic, found that rivers carry an estimated 1.15-2.41 million tonnes of plastic into the sea every year.