The Congress has accused the BJP’s flagship programme Namami Gange of being a damper, alleging that the river’s waters are more polluted than it was before 2014 when the programme was launched. Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that an RTI has revealed that the pollution levels in Ganga are higher than the levels recorded back in 2014.
The RTI, Singhvi said, showed that in Modi’s constituency Varanasi, lab tests have found that bacterial contamination is now higher than the levels recorded back in 2014.
“Till now, under the programme, 221 projects have been sanctioned for various activities such as the treatment of municipal sewage, treatment of industrial effluent, river surface cleaning, etc, at a total cost of Rs 22,238.73 crore, out of which 58 projects have been completed. An additional Rs 2,238.73 crore has been sanctioned for the allocated fund and with more than one and a half year still to go, only one-fourth of the sanctioned projects are complete,” said Singhvi.
He added that in May 2018, Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari had set March 2019 as the new deadline to clean river Ganga.
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Earlier, a CAG report revealed that in 2016-17, the level of pollutants in the river across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Bengal was six to 334 times higher than the prescribed levels. In 2016, the National Green Tribunal came down heavily on the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government for allowing bodies to be dumped in the holy river.
The high commissioner refused to comment on the publication of draft national Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and the resultant controversy over illegal migrants.
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“It would not be wise on my part to second guess what central can give and what centre cannot give…But once the team comes and makes an assessment into which all your (state) inputs will also be taken, and with your inputs, the central assessment team can come up with a figure,” she added.
The Minister later announced a Rs 1 crore aid from her MPs constituency development funds and Rs 7 crore from Corporate Social Responsibility funds of Defence PSUs for flood and landslide relief work, her office said in a tweet.
During her interaction with the displaced people in the relief camp, a child Navanish from village Hebbettigeri presented a pictorial representation of the flood fury.
In a painting, he depicted how the flood destroyed their house, trees in the surrounding and how he saw some people swept away in the flood on a fateful night.
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