Chronicle note; Veer Bhadra Mishra is former head, Civil Engineering Department, IT-BHU. He is an internationally acclaimed specialist on prevention and treatment of pollution of Ganges river and other environmental issues.
Rs 5,000-crore river conservation plan to be revamped
16 Jul 2007, 0222 hrs IST , Nitin Sethi , TNN
NEW DELHI: The government has decided to revamp the Rs 5,000-crore National River Conservation Plan.
This was decided at a meeting held at the PMO to initiate discussions on the strategy. During the meeting, cursory mention was also made of the government's decision to set up a Yamuna board to look after the cleaning-up of the river and the government's plan to spend more than Rs 1,000 crore by 2009.
This preliminary meeting, to which representatives of several non-governmental and technical institutions from across the country were also been invited, was the first effort at the highest level to rework the river cleaning programme, which has been in place since 1995. By 2006, the National River Conservation Plan had funded 20 states to clean up 42 polluted stretches of 34 rivers passing through 160 towns. The total outlay for river cleaning in the country now exceeds Rs 5,000 crore.
The meeting was timed just before the official body that oversees the plan — the National River Conservation Directorate under the environment and forests ministry, which the Prime Minister now heads — meets this month to take stock. Sources revealed that points were raised about the programme facing a tough situation with the water-levels in many rivers falling even as the quality remained an issue to be tackled. The point was also made that unlike developed countries, the Indian programme could not take on capital intensive methods to clean up the waters even as the demand for water from growing urban areas increases.
At the same time, the representatives also talked about the lack of coordination between different departments and states working on the programmes. The meeting was chaired by the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, T K A Nair, and attended by the secretaries for water resources and environment ministries besides heads of institutions like the National Institute of Hydrology, National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) and the Central Pollution Control Board. Besides the officials, several eminent people from outside the government attended the meeting. They included Vir Bhadra Mishra from BHU, Varanasi, and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment.
Sources in the government explained, "We have environmental institutions and individual experts who look at issues of pollution and hydrologists and other experts who look at water supply in the same rivers. They do not work in tandem and there is a general institutional failure in managing our rivers holistically."
The agenda of the meeting also included finding an independent oversight mechanism for the river-cleaning plan. In other words, the government is keen to find a way to separate the agencies that spend the money from the agency that monitor the implementation to bring in greater answerability.
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