Modi's 100 days: Going with flow, PM shows what water, Ganga mean to him

NEW DELHI: The water resources ministry has never attracted the attention that it has in the past three months, largely because the 'Ganga rejuvenation' project is now one of its key components.

Although it will take a while before noticeable changes are visible, the ministry headed by Uma Bharti has put Ganga cleanup on top of its list of priorities, making big plans to develop the river over the next three years.

Laying special emphasis on his pet Ganga-cleaning project, PM Narendra Modi has transferred its nodal agency — the National Ganga River Basin Authority ( NGRBA) — from environment ministry to the water resources ministry, giving Bharti powers to accomplish the task.

Though nothing much has actually happened on the ground yet, the ministry through a brainstorming on the issue — Ganga Manthan — made the right noises to mobilize talent and resources to work towards rejuve nating and cleaning the river.

Bharti said that the work can be done through a public movement, promising to make the Ganga pollution-free within three years by implementing all the projects. The government has devised a mechanism to fund these. It will get money for the river rejuvenation project from the existing `National Clean Energy Fund' (NCEF), capitalized by imposing a cess on coal.

Since NCEF is meant to finance and promote only clean (renewable) energy initiatives, the government has enlarged its ambit and increased the cess on coal to Rs 100 per tonne from Rs 50 per tonne making the corpus big enough to finance the cleanGanga project.

Multiple schemes, to be kicked off soon, and the ongoing development of a 1,620-km navigation corridor between Allahabad and Haldia has collectively been allocated over Rs 6,300 crore in the Budget.

While Rs 2,037 crore will go to the Ganga rejuvenation (Namami Gange) works, the substantial amount of Rs 4,200 crore will go to developing the navigation corridor in six years.

The remaining Rs 100 crore is earmarked for development of `Ghats' and beautification of river-fronts at Kedarnath, Haridwar, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad and Patna.