So, the Seine’s now clean, Ganga, anyone?

Cleaning up large rivers is never easy. Proving they are clean and restoring citizen confidence in them is even tougher. Ask Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. Earlier this week, she got into the Seine to take a well-publicised swim to prove that the city’s most famous river had been cleaned up enough for Olympic swimmers to swim in later this month. Swimming in the Seine had been banned since 1923 due to high pollution levels. Since 2015, organisers invested $1.5 bn to prepare it for the Olympics and to ensure Parisians have a cleaner river after the Games. It seems Parisians now have a river to swim in without worry.

The questions raised about Seine’s cleanliness provide a good opportunity to check the status of India’s lifeline and most famous, the Ganga. Three mega projects have been launched since the 1980s – Ganga Action Plan (1985), National Ganga River Basin Project (2008), and Namami Gange Programme (2014). According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), around ₹20k cr was spent on cleaning the Ganga between 1986 and 2014. Since 2014, another ₹13k cr has been allocated and spent by October 2022.

But we don’t yet have a clear answer to any progress made. In Parliament last year, Jal Shakti ministry said that the river has seen ‘varying degrees of improvement’ in water quality and that the number of polluted stretches has come down. However, news reports point out that the CPCB report quoted by the ministry didn’t mention what he had said. Cleaning the river, the ministry added, is a continuous process, and National Mission for Clean Ganga is implementing several conservation and rejuvenation initiatives for the Ganga and its tributaries. That’s good. But nearly 25 years on, one would have expected better results for a river we consider ‘sacred’.