Ganga activists and scientists said that the government was not even close to cleaning the national river.
The government's efforts at maintaining a minimum ecological flow (e-flow) in river Ganga were dismal and inadequate; increasing the flow of the river should be the Centre's top priority, leading river ecologists, former bureaucrats and scientists said at the inaugural talk of India Rivers Week 2018.
The union government notified a minimum e-flow for Ganga in October, ostensibly to placate scientist-turned-seer GD Agarwal who was on a fast until death. Ganga activists and scientists said that the government was not even close to cleaning the national river.
"The 2018 (e-flow) order is woefully inadequate. Systematically, forests in the upper catchment have been destroyed. Despite the notification of the Bhagirathi eco-sensitive zone, the government of Uttarakhand keeps knocking on the door of the Government of India to build hydropower dams," said Shashi Shekhar, former secretary, Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation.
"For immediate economic gains, we are killing the proverbial goose without thinking of long-term impacts," Shekhar further said. As part of the government, Shekhar said that he tried to stress on the importance of e-flow for the cleaning of the river.
Pointing out the over-exploitation of the river, veteran Ganga activist and scientist Ravi Chopra said that 940 dams, barrages and weirs have been constructed in the larger Ganga basin comprising of 11 major tributaries, such as Yamuna, Kosi and Gandak.
"The biggest threat to Ganga today is its declining flow. An alarming fact is that the discharge from the Gangotri glacier has shown a declining trend between 2000 and 2016. This is due to less precipitation during winters," Chopra said.
Yamuna activist and former IFS officer Manoj Misra said that since 1985 when the first Ganga cleaning project was launched, the central government's sole focus has been the main stem of the river, which forms only 13 per cent of the larger Ganga basin. Misra said that it is time the entire basin is looked into to fix a broken Ganga river system. "We are nowhere close to cleaning Ganga. There is also a problem in understanding the details of cleaning Ganga. The river system is broken and we have to rejuvenate it stream by stream," Misra said.
Major Threats
- Experts say the biggest threat to Ganga today is its declining flow
- An alarming fact is, the discharge from the Gangotri glacier has shown a declining trend between 2000 and 2016
- Activists and scientists say, this is due to less precipitation during winters
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