Modi implores India to restore polluted Ganges

NEW DELHI: The first public gestures that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made on his election were to thank two mothers — his own and “Mother Ganga,” the most famous waterway in India.
The new leader visited his mom, then went on to Varanasi along the Ganges, India’s most threatened river, where under a canopy brightened with marigold flowers and cheered by his constituents as millions watched on television, Modi promised the sacred river would be clean in five years.
“Mother Ganga,” Modi said, “needs someone to take her out of this dirt.” The Ganges is no ordinary river. It originates pristine from a Himalayan glacier 3,048 meters high. Yet raw sewage from 29 cities blights its 2,525-kilometer route as bloated bodies of dead animals, funeral pyre ashes, reduced flow from dams and factory waste fouls its waters.
In his speech, Modi vowed to clean India’s most revered river by the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, a daunting task that echoes a promise uttered almost three decades ago by the late Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi.
Yet it’s not insignificant that Modi made his first policy announcement about water. Nor on the day he assumed power over Asia’s third-biggest economy, he named a minister just to clean the river. Uma Bharti’s title: Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation.
The government will explain its plans to clean the Ganges and “other important rivers in the country,” Bharti said Thursday on taking charge of the ministry, according to the government.
The Yamuna River that starts in the Himalayas and flows through New Delhi and Agra remains heavily polluted by industrial waste and sewage even after $1.1 billion was spent on the waterway, a parliamentary report said this year.
Unlike his efforts to cleanse the smaller Sabarmati River in western Gujarat state, where he was chief minister, the Ganges is far more challenging to Modi’s government: Improve water for 400 million Indians across five of the nation’s most populous states, address groundwater risks, aquifers depleted by farmers and boreholes, and rising arsenic contamination.